Helped by this booty, the men of Dál Cais extended their power. Under the command of their leader, Brian, they seized control of the whole of Munster. After many campaigns and battles, the other kingdoms of Ireland, one by one, yielded. Everywhere the advancing warlord was known as Brian Boru, ‘Brian of the Tributes’. In the year 999 Brian overwhelmed a combined army of Dublin Vikings and Leinstermen. When Máel Mórda, King of Leinster, and Sitric Silkenbeard, King of Dublin, submitted, Brian Boru was acknowledged as High-King of Ireland—the first high-king ever to win the support of every part of the island. For the first time for many generations Ireland was at peace. Brian Boru made a circuit of the whole country in 1005, and, according to the annals, he sent out fleets from Dublin and Waterford to levy tribute from the Welsh, the Saxons and the Scots. He gave generous gifts to the church, to the needy and to scholars. For almost fifteen years Brian Boru ruled as the unchallenged High-King of Ireland. But Brian had made enemies. He had won his crown not by birth, but by the sword.
Episode 23
BRIAN BORU AND THE BATTLE OF CLONTARF
Nothing irked Máel Mórda, King of Leinster, more than a journey to pay homage to Brian at his palace at Kincora. Brian had made his sister Gormflaith his queen, only to cast her aside for another. Finally, insulted by Brian’s arrogant son Murchad during a game of chess, the King of Leinster could stand it no longer. He rode off without so much as bidding farewell to the high-king, back to his fort at Naas. And when Brian sent a messenger after him to call him back, Máel Mórda lashed at the fellow with his yew horse-switch, smashing his skull to pieces.
There was no turning back now. Brian had sworn revenge; and Máel Mórda would no longer submit Leinster to Brian’s authority. Sitric Silkenbeard too resented the many humiliating defeats he had suffered at Brian’s hands and the loss of his city’s independence. Dublin was the mightiest Viking city in Ireland. It had become a Viking kingdom even before Denmark, Norway and Sweden had kings. To throw off Brian’s yoke would be a real prize.
That very year, 1013, had not King Sven of Denmark conquered all of England? Might not the Northmen win a kingdom to match it in Ireland? The King of Dublin and the King of Leinster knew they could not win without help. Longships—one of them with Sitric aboard—left Dublin to sail across the Irish Sea and to the Hebrides and beyond. After many months they returned with firm offers of support.
Good Friday, 23 April 1014: this day the fate not only of Dublin but of all Ireland would be decided, and, whatever the outcome, this conflict would be long remembered in the island’s annals and in the sagas of the Northmen. Looking east towards Howth from the fortified earthen wall along the southern Liffey shore, Sitric Silkenbeard could see silhouetted against the rising sun the massed prows of longships stretching round into the bay. His heart leaped to see these Vikings he had summoned fall in behind their captains on the foreshore. There were, it is said, fighting men from as far away as Norway and France; King Brodar of the Isle of Man, with his long black hair tucked into his belt; and Earl Sigurd the Fat of the Orkneys.
Now on the one side of that battle [wrote the Irish annalist] were the shouting, hateful, powerful, wrestling, murderous, hostile Northmen. These had for the purposes of combat, sharp, swift, fatal arrows, which had been anointed and browned in the blood of dragons and toads, and the water snakes of hell. They had with them hideous, barbarous quivers; and polished yellow-shining bows; and strong, broad, green, sharp, rough, dark spears, in the stout, bold, hard hands of pirates. They had also with them polished, pliable, triple-plated, heavy, stout corselets of double-refined iron, and heroic, heavy, hard-striking, strong, powerful, stout swords.
This day, along with King Máel Mórda and all his men of Leinster, these Northmen would do battle not only with Irishmen from a host of kingdoms but also with Brian’s Viking subjects from Limerick and Waterford. This would not be a simple battle between Irishmen and Northmen: Irish would fight Irish, and Vikings would fight Vikings.
As Sitric’s warriors set out for Dubhghall’s Bridge, built to span the deepest channel of the Liffey at Áth Cliath, the ‘ford of hurdles’, the King of Dublin remained behind to command the city’s defence. Brian too would not be a combatant, for he was now over seventy years old; as he prayed in his tent for victory his son Murchad led out a mighty host—the men of Munster, the Norse of Limerick and Waterford, Ospak of Man, and Connacht allies. The Dublin army, advancing north-east, crossed the Tolka stream and drew up in formation at Clontarf with their backs to the sea to stand beside their allies from overseas.
Challenges by champions to engage in single combat began the battle; then, to the sound of horrible war-cries, the two sides closed in:
And there was fought between them a battle furious, bloody, repulsive, crimson, gory, boisterous, manly, rough, fierce, unmerciful, hostile, on both sides; and they began to hew and cleave, and stab, and cut, to slaughter, to mutilate each other ...
Never before had so great a battle been fought on Irish soil. Never before had so many men of noble birth lost their lives in one engagement in Ireland: among them were Murchad, Earl Sigurd, the Mormaer of Mar, Máel Mórda, and the two kings leading the Connacht forces. Late in the afternoon the Leinster-Norse army began to fall back to Dubhghall’s Bridge and into the advancing tide, and here there was a fearful slaughter:
They retreated therefore to the sea, like a herd of cows in heat, from sun, and from gadflies and from insects; and they were pursued closely, rapidly and lightly; and the foreigners were drowned in great numbers in the sea, and they lay in heaps and hundreds ...
Brodar of Man escaped the massacre on the shore and hacked his way through the lines to reach Brian’s tent; there he swept aside the bodyguard and, with one blow of his battle-axe, cleft the head of the old king in two. The enraged Munster warriors pursued Brodar, formed a ring around him with branches, cut open his belly, tied his entrails to a tree, and led him round it till he died.
Long after, tales of the battle were recited by northern firesides; Valkyries were seen weaving a web of battle with swords on a loom of death; and in the Icelandic Njal’s Saga Earl Gilli spoke of his vision before the battle:
I have been where warriors wrestled,
High in Erin sang the sword,
Boss to boss met many bucklers;
Steel rang sharp on rattling helm;
I can tell of all their struggle;
Sigurd fell in flight of spears;
Brian fell, but kept his kingdom
Ere he lost one drop of blood.
Episode 24
‘A TREMBLING SOD’
The assassination of Brian Boru at the moment of victory made certain that, for a long time to come, all Ireland would not be ruled by one man. Brian had made the high-kingship a reality, and now the provincial kings were locked in a violent and inconclusive contest to become the ruler of the whole island. Brian’s death also ensured that the Vikings would stay. Indeed, their towns and cities continued to grow, and the Northmen did much to promote the modernisation of Ireland by drawing the country more closely into European trade networks. The Norse settlements became like other Irish kingdoms, and they were perpetually involved in interprovincial power struggles. No contender for the high-kingship had any hope of succeeding without the support of Dublin, which in the eleventh century became perhaps the most prosperous and populous city in the Viking world.
Historians began to understand the real importance of Viking Dublin in the 1970s. At that time wholesale clearance to build new civic offices at Wood Quay presented archaeologists with an unrivalled opportunity. The finds were dramatic enough in themselves, but what gave the excavations international importance was the extraordinary level of preservation: wood, sally rods, leather cloth and other fragile organic substances had survived to such a degree that the structure of dwellings, pathways and workshops could be plainly seen. Olivia O’Leary of the Irish Times reported on the work in progress:
Down on the site, workers pace thei
r little sections like children on a beach tip-toe around the ankle-high walls of their sand castles. The whole outlines of wooden houses are there. The post and wattle walls come to a foot and more above the ground; the posts are sturdy, about the thickness of your fist, and the wattle twigs wind around them like basket-work cemented with mud ... there are mounds of mussel and cockle shells there. The workers say there was a distinct odour from the cesspits when they were first opened and human turds are carefully removed to the finds tray along with bronze cloakpins and bone combs.
The meticulous removal of centuries-old detritus revealed the extent to which Viking Dublin had become a city of specialised craftsworkers. Tools, generally of iron, were numerous: hammers, a woodworker’s plane with its iron blade, axes, drawknives, chisels, punches, awls, boring-bits, tongs, shears, with hones and rotating grindstones for giving a sharp edge to them. Glass linen-smoothers, wooden beetles, weighted spindles, wooden reels, sewing-needles of bronze, bone and iron, and hundreds of fragments of fine woven cloth revealed a sophisticated level of textile-making. The finding of board games, model wooden longships and bone whistles for children captured the public imagination, and the unearthing of a hitherto unknown section of Viking city wall—with remains of severed heads, a babe in arms, and a tenth-century pet terrier on the old shoreline—kept the excavations in the headlines.
Sitric Silkenbeard’s father, King Olaf Cuarán, had been baptised in 979 and his people soon after. Sitric himself built Dublin’s first cathedral, Christ Church, in 1038—it was probably constructed in wood. It dominated the high ground above the Liffey, overlooking a crowded and thriving community. Some had houses made of wooden planking thrust into the soil, but most were content with thatched dwellings of post and wattle, daubed with mud and manure to keep out the wind and the rain. Here, in good times, rich stews simmered on central hearths. In fair weather, away from the acrid smoke of their cramped dwellings, women, with their hair tied back in fine nets, spun yarn deftly with spindle and whorl, and craftsmen plied their trades: carpenters with their chisels; turners with lathes; leatherworkers with punch and awl; tanners curing hides with oak bark in deep wicker-lined pits; cutlers sharpening blades on revolving hones; bronze-workers etching intricate designs on bone trial pieces; and comb-makers shaping slivers of antler cast by red deer in the neighbouring woods. Here merchants sold earthenware jars of wine, and bought slaves, hides, and exquisitely worked Irish silver and bronze. The city must also have been a shipbuilding centre, for the remains of the largest Viking ship ever found was discovered to have been made of oak from Dublin.
Dublin was such a prize that the King of Norway, Magnus Barelegs (so called because he gave up trews to wear an Irish tunic), seized the city in 1102 and declared: ‘Why should I return home since my heart is in Dublin? There is an Irish girl whom I love better than myself.’ However, Magnus was killed in the following year in a skirmish near Downpatrick. Henceforth, the struggle to rule the whole island would be left to Irish kings. So fierce was their warring that one annalist declared they were making Ireland ‘a trembling sod’.
Episode 25
THE RAPE OF DERVORGILLA
For a century and a half after the Battle of Clontarf the provincial kings of Ireland vied with one another and fought one another to become the High-King of Ireland. The descendants of Brian Boru, the O’Briens, quickly lost power to Dermot mac Máel na mBó, King of Leinster. Dermot seized Dublin in 1052 and in time forced most of the kings of Ireland to acknowledge him as high-king. In addition, he used Dublin’s formidable fleet of longships to dominate the Irish Sea and become ruler of the Isle of Man and the Western Isles. Harold Godwinson spent the winter of 1051–2 in Ireland under Dermot’s protection, and after Harold had been defeated and killed at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 his sons found refuge with this powerful Irish high-king.
When Dermot was killed in battle in 1072, he was described by an annalist as the ‘King of Ireland with opposition’. All succeeding high-kings, winning control of most but never all of Ireland, could be described as ‘kings with opposition’. Dermot’s replacement was a grandson of Brian Boru, Turlough O’Brien. His son Murtagh O’Brien succeeded him in 1086 and came very close to being the ruler of all Ireland. The most tenacious opposition always seemed to come from Ulster, and for a time an Uí Néill ruler, Donal MacLochlainn, became high-king.
Not only did Irish kings wage war against one another in contest for the high-kingship, but, within each dynasty, there were constant succession disputes—this was almost inevitable when, by Irish law, all sons and grandsons had a claim on the throne when a king died. In these ruthless struggles, defeated claimants were frequently ritually blinded or otherwise maimed.
In 1151 the annals record a great battle at Móin Mór in north Cork and claimed that 7,000 Munstermen were killed. This marked the rise of Turlough O’Connor, King of Connacht, who defeated the O’Briens and divided Munster in two, into Thomond (north Munster) and Desmond (south Munster).
It might be possible to pass over this dreary, seemingly interminable warfare but for the fact that it was to lead to the coming of the Normans to Ireland. That story begins with a deadly conflict between Tiernan O’Rourke, the one-eyed King of Bréifne, and Dermot MacMurrough, King of Leinster. Their quarrel was principally over the rich pastures of the kingdom of Meath, but it was further embittered by the love between Dermot and Tiernan’s wife, Dervorgilla. One night in 1152 hooves thundered away from the Bréifne capital of Dromahair as Dermot carried off Dervorgilla together with a great prey of cattle. This humiliation burned in Tiernan’s memory and filled his heart with vengeful hatred to his dying day. The events were recorded by Gerald of Wales a few years later:
On an occasion when O’Rourke had gone off on an expedition to far distant parts, his wife, whom he had left on an island, was abducted by the aforesaid Dermot, who had long been burning with love for her and took advantage of her husband’s absence. No doubt she was abducted because she wanted to be and, since ‘woman is always a fickle and inconstant creature’, she herself arranged that she should become the kidnapper’s prize.
Almost all the world’s most notable catastrophes have been caused by women, witness Mark Antony and Troy. King O’Rourke was stirred to extreme anger on two counts, of which however the disgrace, rather than the loss of his wife, grieved him more deeply, and he vented all the venom of his fury with a view to revenge.
O’Rourke had to wait fourteen years for his revenge, for Dermot had hitched his fortunes to the rising star of Murtagh MacLochlainn. In 1166 Murtagh captured and blinded the Ulaid king, Eochaid MacDonleavy, in defiance of solemn guarantees given by the Archbishop of Armagh. The revulsion following this act of treachery caused Murtagh’s support to drop away, and shortly afterwards this high-king was killed in a skirmish. The Norman-French poem The Song of Dermot and the Earl continues the story:
O’Rourke, much grieving,
To Connacht went in all haste.
To the king of Connacht he relates all;
Very earnestly he besought him
To make ready for him
Some of his household and of his men
So that he could avenge his shame.
Rory O’Connor of Connacht, now rapidly establishing his claim to the high-kingship, gave his blessing to Tiernan’s punitive expedition. The men of Bréifne, supported by the Dublin Norse and the King of Meath, swept into Leinster and devastated MacMurrough’s kingdom. Dermot had no choice but to flee from Ireland. Rory O’Connor then made a circuit of Ireland and won the submission of all the kings of the island. At last it seemed that one man had become the High-King of Ireland without opposition.
Rory O’Connor, however, had reckoned without Dermot and his new-found friends.
Episode 26
‘AT BAGINBUN, IRELAND WAS LOST AND WON’
Early in the tenth century Charles the Simple, King of France, desperate to end the ravaging of his dominions by the Northmen, made an agreement to give Rolf the
Ganger a province of northern France in return for peace. These Vikings settled contentedly, married French girls and learned to speak their language. Soon this province of Normandy became a powerful state, and in 1066, led by their Duke William, the Normans defeated Harold of England at Hastings. The conquest of England was ruthlessly completed within a few years, and Norman barons were beginning to penetrate into south Wales and southern Scotland. Other Normans carved out a kingdom for themselves in southern Italy and Sicily, while the descendants of William the Conqueror extended their dominions in other parts of France. The genius of the Normans for organisation and effective government, together with their skill in warfare, made them feared and respected far and wide.
O king of heaven, awful is the deed done in Ireland today, the kalends of August, that is, the expulsion overseas, by the men of Ireland, of Dermot son of Donnchad MacMurrough, King of Leinster and the Northmen. Alas, alas, what shall I do?
So exclaimed the scribe of the Book of Leinster when Dermot, his wife and daughter and a small group of followers fled to England on 1 August 1166. Dermot, however, had plans to recover his kingdom. He called on his friend Robert fitz Harding, the reeve of Bristol. Fitz Harding advised him to seek out his king, Henry II, by now the most powerful monarch in western Europe. Dermot travelled to Aquitaine and, according to The Song of Dermot and the Earl, addressed Henry as follows:
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 Page 8
