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

  Lisnaskea: ‘fort of the hawthorns’; Lissycasey: ‘O’Casey’s fort’; Lisduff: ‘black fort’; Lislea: ‘grey fort’; Lismore: ‘big fort’; Lisnamuck: ‘fort of the pig’; Listowel: ‘Tuathal’s fort’; Lisheen: ‘little fort’.

  The earthen and stone circular banks and walls would have kept out wolves and would-be cattle-thieves and marauders, but not a determined attack. These were simply the homes of extended families, and the enclosure served as a farmyard for chickens and pigs and for activities such as butter-churning. Inside the enclosure there was room for around six houses; generally these were round, though some, for example at Carraig Aille in Co. Limerick and Leacanabuile in Co. Kerry, were rectangular. Excavations in 1984 at the Deer Park Farms near Glenarm in Co. Antrim found that people had lived there continuously between the sixth and tenth centuries. The houses here had been constructed of two concentric rings of hazel wattles, strengthened with thick upright posts, to create a kind of cavity wall filled with straw, grass, moss and heather for insulation—and one house had a thatch of reeds woven into the circular outer wall for added comfort. The wattle walls were designed to slope inwards to form a roof which was then covered with reeds or straw. The people who lived in these houses liked to see the sun rise in the morning, and nearly all ringforts have entrances facing east.

  A feature of later ringforts which for long intrigued archaeologists was what they termed a ‘souterrain’. A souterrain was an underground passage leading to a chamber, carefully drained, lined with stone flags, provided with ventilation shafts, and roofed with stone lintels covered over with grass sods. It now seems certain that these were temporary hiding-places for use if the homestead was attacked, and that valuables—such as an imported glass vessel found in one at Mullaroe, Co. Sligo—and precious seedcorn and food, which needed to be kept cool in summer, were stored here. The poor may not have been able to afford to maintain ringforts, and archaeologists are increasingly coming across more modest dwellings without any embankments, for example at Ballynavenooragh on the slopes of Mount Brandon on the Dingle peninsula.

  The remains of some two thousand lake dwellings have been identified in Ireland. Known as ‘crannogs’, these were wholly or partly artificial made of split timber (sometimes fitted together with pegs) and layers of soil, brushwood, peat and stones retained by a timber palisade. Many were found with remains of landing-stages, jetties and dugout boats. Since considerable resources of labour were needed to build them, these were dwelling-places for the better-off and were designed for defence. Lagore crannog in Co. Meath, for example, was the residence of the Kings of South Brega between the seventh and tenth centuries. Here there had evidently been a massacre, as broken skulls and a great many weapons were found. Some crannogs may have served as the equivalent of holiday homes for the wealthy where recreations such as fishing, wildfowling and hunting could be carried on. Possibly because they were making so many valuable and portable objects, metalworkers seem to have found crannogs secure places for practising their crafts. Many luxury decorated bronze and silver pieces have been found on crannogs, and one at Bofeenaun in Co. Mayo was entirely devoted to iron forging and smithing. The main activity of the vast majority living in the Irish countryside was, of course, the production of food.

  Episode 16

  LIVING OFF THE LAND

  Ringforts have generally been found in clusters of two or three, hinting that they were the homesteads of a derbfine, a four-generation lineage group—in other words, a large extended family. These farming communities gave every indication of being complex family co-operatives. Visiting Ireland in the twelfth century, Gerald of Wales had a poor opinion of Irish farming practices:

  They use fields generally as a pasture.... Little is cultivated, and even less sown. The fields cultivated are so few because of the neglect of those who cultivate them.... For given only to leisure, and devoted only to laziness, they think that the greatest pleasure is not to work.... This people is, then, a barbarous people ...

  Archaeologists, using aerial photography, pollen analysis, dendrochronology and other sophisticated techniques, have proved Gerald wrong. In plots close to the ringfort, onions, carrots, parsnips, cabbages, chives, leeks and beans were grown. In rectangular fields, carefully fenced against domestic animals, red deer and wild boar, the ground was turned over to cultivate corn. The poor used no more than a spade, a simple wooden implement with an iron sheath. Most extended families, however, could put together a team of four oxen yoked abreast to draw a plough, which from the tenth century onwards was fitted with a heavy share to cut the furrow and a coulter for turning the sod. Harrowing to break up the clods was done with a horse, since oxen were too slow for this task. Whole families turned out for harvesting in September to cut the corn close to the ear with iron-socketed or tanged reaping-hooks. After being stacked in a rick in the ringfort enclosure, the corn was threshed with flails. Ireland’s wet climate meant that in most years the corn had to be dried in kilns before being winnowed to remove the chaff.

  For most people corn meant two- or six-eared barley, though in the wetter north-west oats were preferred. In Ireland’s uncertain climate wheat was a luxury grain, grown mostly in the south-east, to be eaten by kings and nobles. A miracle attributed to several Irish saints was that they turned fields of barley into wheat. The laborious task of grinding corn was assigned to women using the rotary quern which, in early Christian times, replaced the saddle quern. Many families, however, were prepared to pay for the use of a corn mill. Probably the most sophisticated engines available in Ireland at the time, these mills were two-storey structures built over a stream: water, released by sluice-gates down a millrace, poured onto the dished paddles of a horizontal wheel to turn the millstone above. Recent examples from Strangford Lough show that the wheels there were rotated by the power of the ebbing tide.

  Cattle formed the mainstay of the mixed Irish farming economy. White animals with red ears were especially prized, but most were small and black like the modern Kerry breed. Male calves were slaughtered for meat and to supply the monasteries with vellum, except for those kept for breeding and to draw ploughs. Milch cows were worth twice as much as heifers and were slaughtered only when they were past their best. Cattle were driven out onto common pastures, herded and protected by dogs, and cows were milked for butter- and cheese-making. There was no-hay making; instead, in the autumn the cattle were put into fields that had been fenced off over the summer, where they were able to graze the long stubble left after the harvest. Animals which could not be kept fed over the winter were slaughtered then to provide not only meat for salting but also leather, sinew, tallow, bone and horn. Sheep were less important and were kept for their dark wool more than for their meat. Pigs, long-legged and shaggy, driven out into the woods to fatten up on acorns, were highly prized.

  A curious feature of early Christian Ireland is the almost total absence of pottery. Instead bowls and platters were made from turned wood; baskets were much used; and barrels and butter-churns were constructed from staved wood. The Irish ate barley in the form of gruel and bread, oatcakes and porridge, butter—fresh when in season, heavily salted during the winter—buttermilk curds, meat when they could get it, vegetables from the gardens, and cultivated apples from fenced-off orchards. Fresh milk was a luxury, and generally food was washed down with home-made ale and buttermilk. The woods provided wild garlic, raspberries, blackberries and hazelnuts. Though the wild boar was hunted to extinction by the twelfth century, much game—especially red deer, hares and wildfowl—was consumed. Salmon, trout and eels also found favour, but it took the Vikings to teach the Irish how to enjoy sea fish. Shellfish were despised as food fit only for the destitute. Famine and disease were never too far away, and when they struck they triggered dislocating movements of population. The plague of 1084, which the annals stated killed one in four, was seen to be the work of

  demons which came from the northern isles of the world, three battalions of them, and there were three thou
sand in each battalion.... This is the way they were seen by Mac Gilla Lugáin: wherever their heat and fury reached, there their poison was taken, for there was a sword of fire in each of them, and each of them was as high as the clouds of the sky.

  These words were written in a monastery, an establishment which by this time was developing into the nearest equivalent Ireland had to a town.

  Episode 17

  SAINTS AND SCHOLARS

  Eight miles out beyond the rugged Iveragh peninsula in south-west Kerry the lonely island of Skellig Michael, a pyramid of bare rock, rises to a peak seven hundred feet above the Atlantic Ocean. In winter, gales howl round its crags and gigantic waves thunder at the base of is cliffs. Even in summer the sea is rarely calm, and it is not easy to make a landing. Only sea-pinks and a few other hardy plants can survive in its thin soil. This is, perhaps, the most desolate place in Ireland, fit only for fish-hunting gannets and puffins. Yet nearly one and a half thousand years ago Skellig rock was chosen by Irish monks as a site for their monastery, where they would leave behind the world of violence and the temptation of ambition and riches.

  Lacking both timber and mortar, they used only the rock around them. On the brow of a five-hundred-foot precipice the monks placed pieces of hewn rock on the ground to form flat terraces which they surrounded with great drystone walls. Then on the highest terrace they erected six beehive-shaped cells nestling against the rock. So perfectly were these stones fitted together that even today the driving rain cannot penetrate the uncemented walls and corbelled roofs.

  Inside the cells, where the monks studied and slept, the walls are carefully smoothed, with built-in stone cupboards and stone hooks for book satchels, and the floors are paved and drained. Two oratories, looking like upturned boats, built in much the same way as the cells and decorated with simple crosses, served as places of worship. In summer, when great shoals of mackerel broke the surface of the ocean in pursuit of sprats, and when sea-birds nested on the rock, the monks could survive on gulls’ eggs, fish and herbs grown in the scanty soil of the monastery garden. During winter gales they must have hungered, and no doubt some of the monks buried in the tiny graveyard died of starvation.

  The greatest Irish monasteries, such as Monasterboice in Co. Louth and Clonmacnoise in Co. Offaly, were placed on fertile lands, where, patronised by kings, they became centres of wealth and population as well as of craftsmanship and scholarship. However, many Irish were determined to remove themselves from worldly temptation: they joined communities on remote mountainsides and on lake and sea islands, though none were perhaps as desolate as Skellig.

  These ascetic monks and nuns ate only one meal a day, and only on very special occasions were they allowed to eat meat. The ‘Good Rule of Bangor’, written by Columbanus, detailed the regime for the ascetic religious life:

  Let the monks’ food be poor and taken in the evening, and their drink such as to avoid drunkenness, so that it may both maintain life and not harm their souls: vegetables, beans, flour mixed with water, together with a small loaf of bread, lest the stomach be burdened and the mind confused. We must fast daily, just as we must feed daily.

  Stiff penalties were laid down for those who dared to break the demanding rules:

  Him who has not waited for grace at table and has not responded Amen, it is ordained to correct with six blows. Likewise him who has spoken while eating it is ordained to correct with six blows. Let him who has cut the table with a knife be corrected with ten blows. He who with unclean hands receives the blessed bread, with twelve blows.

  The main purpose of the monastic life was worship by constant prayer, psalms and songs of praise:

  Those who have gone before us have appointed three Psalms at each of the day-time hours. But at night-fall twelve Psalms are chanted, and at mid-night likewise; but towards morning twenty-four are appointed.

  Part of each day was spent in private study and in the scriptorium—the thirst for scholarship seems to have been as strong as that for the simple life. Many of the monks composed religious poems and hymns:

  Raise your voice in praise, O people!

  Praise the Lord God everywhere

  Since the little birds must praise Him—

  They who have no soul but air.

  Manuscripts from early Christian Ireland are frequently embellished with little poems in praise of nature, often written in the margins, such as this one:

  A hedge of trees is all around;

  The blackbird’s praise I shall not hide;

  Above my book so smoothly lined

  The birds are singing far and wide.

  In a green cloak of bushy boughs

  The cuckoo pipes his melodies—

  Be good to me, God, on Judgment Day!—

  How well I write beneath the trees!

  Irish monks were particularly fond of writing invocations—perhaps in the style formerly composed by pagan druids. This one, rewritten by Mrs Alexander in Victorian times, has become a favourite hymn:

  Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart,

  Naught be all else to me, save that thou art;

  Thou my best thought in the day and the night,

  Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light ...

  Episode 18

  ‘NOT THE WORK OF MEN BUT OF ANGELS’

  From the Roman Empire which they helped to destroy the Irish obtained Christianity and, with it, the art of writing. The earliest known form of the Irish language is carved in Ogam, a primitive script made up of groupings of notches on the angular corner of stones. Irish monks soon learned the Latin script and began to write it in a distinct native style.

  The Romans wrote on Egyptian papyrus, but this material made from Nile reeds disintegrated quickly in the damp Irish climate. While other parts of Europe were moving over to parchment, made from sheepskin, the Irish preferred the more expensive skins of new-born calves which, after being tanned and carefully scraped free of hair, were turned into smooth and almost luminous vellum.

  The earliest surviving Irish manuscript is a copy of the Psalms, known as the Cathach (the ‘Battler’), because it was later carried into battle as a talisman by the O’Donnells. An ancient tradition, which may well be true, attributes the writing of the Cathach to Colmcille himself. And most of the great illuminated Irish manuscripts were written and decorated in monasteries founded by him.

  Monks cut their own goose quills and prepared inks from carefully collected pigments. The Irish developed their own unique insular half-uncial, majuscule and miniscule script and specialised in enlarged capital letters at the beginning of paragraphs. In time these capital letters increased in size and elaboration. Scribes often tried to relieve this arduous work by scribbling in the margins, for example:

  Let no reader blame this writing for my arm is cramped from too much work.

  Another wrote:

  Alas! My hand! O my breast, Holy Virgin! This page is difficult.

  —but he seems to have recovered a few pages later when he tells us:

  The third hour. Time for dinner!

  Another exclaims:

  I am sad without food today! A blessing on the soul of Fergus! Amen. I am very cold! ... Love lasts while the money lasts.

  Another cut himself, probably sharpening his quill, and drew a black circle round the blot of blood on the page with this note:

  Blood from the finger of Melaghlin.

  ‘Goodbye, little book,’ a scribe had written when he finished his creation, and another concludes with these words:

  This is sad! O little book!—A day will come in truth, when someone over thy page will say, ‘The hand that wrote it is no more’.

  Other scribes wrote verse:

  My hand is weary with writing,

  My sharp quill is not steady,

  My slender-beaked pen juts forth

  A black draught of dark-blue ink.

  A stream of the wisdom of blessed God

  Springs from my fair-brown shapely hand: On the page it squirts
its draught

  Of ink of the green-skinned holly.

  My little dripping pen travels

  Across the plain of shining books,

  Without ceasing for the wealth of the great—

  Whence my hand is weary with writing.

  The greatest achievements of early Christian Ireland are the magnificent illuminated Gospels and other sacred texts. The Book of Durrow, completed around 670, was the first to include a so-called carpet page, an abstract design based on intricate Celtic interlacing. The high point of manuscript illumination was reached in the Book of Kells, which combines strong sweeping compositions with astonishingly detailed, almost microscopic, ornament. The most admired page combines the sacred chi-rho monogram with images of Christ, the Resurrection and the Eucharist; and the stately rounded script is punctuated with scenes such as cats pursuing mice, an otter seizing a fish, a cock with hens, and a greyhound hunting. It has a good claim to be the most beautiful book executed during the first millennium. Overseas, Gospels and commentaries almost as accomplished can be found in greatest number in the monastery founded by St Gall in Switzerland, carried there by Irish pilgrims or written there by Irish scribes. After examining the Book of Kildare, now lost, Gerald of Wales came to the conclusion that it was ‘not the work of men but of angels’.