A History of Ireland in 100 Objects

by Fintan O'Toole

  39. Slave chain, late-ninth or early-tenth century

  The clink of this iron chain is a dark note that sounds through much of Irish history, from St Patrick to twentieth-century institutions of incarceration. It is the sound of slavery. It was found, along with a human skull, iron spearhead and bronze pin, near Ardakillen crannóg, Co. Roscommon. Its function was brutally plain: to turn people into moveable property. It is a remnant of a trade that sold Irish slaves to places as far apart as Iceland and the Arab world.

  The Old Norse word for a slave, ‘thræll’, is still part of our language, as thrall; but slavery had a long and disreputable history in Ireland before the Vikings. St Patrick was captured as a slave, and one of the first written documents in Irish history is his Letter to Coroticus, denouncing a British chieftain who had enslaved some members of his Christian flock. Bondage remained a feature of later Irish society: there are records in the annals of families selling children in times of need.

  In the ninth century, Viking Dublin had emerged as a major slaving centre, from which captives, not merely from the rest of Ireland but also from Britain, were traded. The slave trade retained a significant role in the city’s commerce until the twelfth century. (In a foretaste of nineteenth-century imperial rhetoric, the suppression of the slave trade was one excuse for the imposition of English overlordship in Ireland. The Anglo-Normans did in fact ban the use of Christian slaves; a progressive move that took several hundred years to disseminate across the rest of the European continent.)

  Most slaves are anonymous, but we have the names of a few Irish people enslaved by Vikings. The ‘Life’ of St Findan (or Fintan), a Leinster monk who died in Switzerland in 878, records the capture of his sister by Vikings. When Findan seeks to ransom her, he himself is captured. He is sold in succession to four different masters before he escapes. There is specific mention of the enslaved Findan being bound in chains. The Icelandic Laxdæla saga contains the story of Melkorka (probably Máel Curcaig), the daughter of an Irish king, who is captured in a raid when she is just fifteen and sold in a slave market in Norway to ‘Gilli the Russian’. She is then bought by a Viking called Höskuldr for ‘three silver pieces’. He takes her to Iceland, where she bears him a son, Oláfr, whom she teaches to speak Irish. She somehow retains a defiant personality: when Höskuldr’s wife contemptuously flings stockings at her head, Melkorka responds by giving her a bloody nose. Few Irish slaves were the children of kings, and few would have survived such defiance. In the saga, Melkorka pretends for years to be deaf and dumb. Slaves, indeed, seldom get to speak or to leave the records of their own voices. The only sound they leave behind is the dull clank of a chain.

  40. Silver cone, mid-tenth century

  The slave chain is at the brutal end of the spectrum of Viking Ireland. This gorgeous cone of woven silver wire is, physically and symbolically, at the other extreme. It sits in the palm of the hand as lightly as a confection of spun sugar. It speaks of delicacy and delight, of complex conception and marvellous execution. It is hard to think of anything further removed from the idea of brute force.

  ‘When I look at this’, says Andy Halpin of the National Museum, ‘the first question that comes to my mind is, How do you make it? From a technological point of view, it is an extraordinary thing’. There are three separate interwoven bands of silver, each composed of between fifteen and eighteen wires. Yet, Halpin says, it is very hard to find where any of these wires ends. The visual effect is that of a single thread turning endlessly around itself. There are traces of some kind of organic material inside the cone, possibly a wax shape around which the wires were woven. The visual imagination and the physical deftness required to do so are of the highest order.

  This cone is one of the largest of a group of eighteen found in 1999 in the limestone cave at Dunmore, just north of Kilkenny city. The cave was well-known in early mediaeval Ireland, and the annals refer to a great slaughter perpetrated there around 930. The cones were found with coins that indicate a later date for their deposition—about 970.

  The larger cones like the one pictured are unique objects, but the smaller ones in the hoard have parallels in Viking burials on the Isle of Man and Iceland. What we may have, then, is a development in Ireland of a general Norse form. The possibility that the cones were made in Dublin points to a very high level of distinctive craftsmanship in the new town by the mid-tenth century.

  What were the cones for? A border of silver wire to which they seem originally to have been attached was found with the cones. More exciting was a small, unpromising-looking remnant of textile that turned out to be very fine silk. It seems that this was an elaborate silk garment with a silver wire border and cones that functioned either as tassels or as buttons. The silk itself may have been more valuable than all the silver put together. It had come, almost certainly, from either the Byzantine empire or the Arab world. The dye used to colour it was either red or purple. If it were the latter, the dress was truly amazing: purple dye was breathtakingly expensive. Either way, the woman who originally wore this garment must have made a dazzling spectacle. For the display of female wealth and status in tenth-century Western Europe, glamour does not get much more fabulous than this.

  Who this woman was is as mysterious as the presence of this extraordinary example of Viking power-dressing in Co. Kilkenny. All we know is that someone had a garment worth a king’s ransom, shoved it in a crack in a cave, perhaps in a moment of panic, and never came back for it.

  41. Carved crook, early-eleventh century

  For a long time the Viking intervention in Ireland was an unsettled affair. The invaders suffered some serious military reverses. Groups of raiders moved back and forth between Ireland, Britain and the continent. The development of Dublin was shaped by these patterns. In 902 the Viking leaders were expelled from the town and withdrew to north-western Britain. In 914, however, a large Norse fleet appeared off Waterford, having sailed from Brittany, and began making raids. Three years later this fleet was followed by Sitric Cáech, a grandson of King Ivár, whose dynasty had ruled in Dublin before 902. Sitric re-established control over Dublin while his brother Ragnall took control of Viking York. After Ragnall’s death, Sitric ruled the joint kingdom, combining Dublin and York.

  In 954 the expulsion of Eric Bloodaxe from York severed the connection between the two towns. Dublin became the main urban centre not just of the Irish Sea, but of the western Vikings. Dublin was clearly highly conscious of its place in the Viking maritime world: some of the loveliest items found there are toy ships, and there are also timbers with beautifully etched pictures of Norse ships complete with masts, sails and rigging. The town, as it settled down, began to develop its own culture, one that can reasonably be called Hiberno-Norse.

  Dublin was a mixed space, in terms of both culture and population. Some items of personal ornamentation, such as oval brooches typical of Scandinavian women, have been found in Ireland, but Dr Pat Wallace, former director of the National Museum, who led the excavations of the Viking Dublin settlements, points out that in none of the Dublin excavations have typically Scandinavian items of female personal ornamentation ever turned up. His conclusion is that the female population of the town was almost entirely Irish. ‘From a female point of view, it is a very Irish place’, he says. This makes it probable that Irish was spoken, alongside Norse, in Dublin, resulting in a pidgin ‘a bit like Hong Kong English’.

  Norse words (especially commercial and maritime terms) seeped into the indigenous language. This mixing meant that the town quickly acquired its own culture, which is well represented in this beautifully carved wooden crook, found during the Museum’s excavations at Fishamble Street. It is recognisably influenced by the Ringerike style, named after the district of Norway where it flourished. Ringerike, says Wallace, ‘was not particularly popular in England, but it caught on here, and the Irish Vikings turned it into their own expression, particularly in Dublin’. The purpose of the carved crook is unclear. It may have been a whip handle
or a furniture finial. There seems to have been a concentration of wood-turners and coopers in Fishamble Street. It was there that what James Lang called the ‘Dublin school’ of woodcraft had its centre.

  42. Breac Maodhóg, late-eleventh century

  The Breac Maodhóg (the ‘speckled or variegated shrine of St Maodhóg’, a bishop and patron saint of the kings of Leinster) is a house-shaped reliquary, probably made in the late-eleventh century. It is made of large sheets of bronze that formed the background to its real glory: the delightful bronze plaques depicting lively figures of clerics and women. The bronze figures are, as Dr Pat Wallace puts it, ‘so deeply moulded that it looks as if it is carved wood’.

  The shrine is strongly associated with Drumlane, Co. Cavan. It was bought in the early 1840s by the antiquarian George Petrie, from ‘Mr Reilly, a jeweller, a Cavan man’. The shrine speaks of continuity. Its shape is an enlargement of a form used since the eighth century, long before the Vikings. The clerics depicted on the shrine are hardly ascetic. With their fine cloaks and tunics, long ringlets and extravagant beards, all worn in idiosyncratic styles, they seem every bit as fashion-conscious as the women. The curved ornamen­tation of the folds of the clerics’ garments and the serpentine elaborations of their coiffure recall the traditional styles of Irish abstract art, but the figures are so lifelike and vividly individual that it does not seem too much of a stretch to think of them as partial portraits. Certainly the artist, in depicting a melancholy cleric with his head resting on his hand, his eyes drooping, was drawing not just on stylised forms but also on observed human behaviour. On one end of the shrine there is a unique depiction of a musician playing a recognisably Irish harp—the oldest image of what would, much later, become a national symbol.

  What is striking about these images is not just what they show but also what they do not. The luxury, humour and personality of the portraits suggest a church at ease in its cultural environment. There is none of the exaggerated triumphalism you get from a culture that has to shout to be heard, no sense of pressure or embattlement; this absence tells its own story. The Vikings came to Ireland with their own sophisticated religious mythology and belief systems. Initially, they were a threat to the established order in Ireland, not just as violent raiders but, specifically, as pagans. The second of these threats gradually faded along with the first. The Irish annals refer to the Scandinavians as genti or geinte (gentiles, pagans) until the second half of the ninth century, but the last mention of the ‘heathens of Dublin’ is in 942. There does not seem to have been any single moment of conversion, and there was probably a considerable overlap between those who had gone native and those who kept to the old religion. Conversion, as Donnchadh Ó Corráin has put it, ‘must have come gradually, as an effect of assimilation’.

  43. Clonmacnoise crozier, eleventh century

  Earlier in this book we saw a carved wooden crook from Viking Dublin. Its similarity to this gorgeous abbot’s crozier from the great monastery of Clonmacnoise, Co. Offaly, is striking. Nothing could provide a more powerful visual contradiction of the old notion that the Vikings were simply an alien presence in Ireland, driven away by Brian Bóruma (Boru) in 1014 at the Battle of Clontarf. The crozier is probably associated with the shrine of the monastery’s founder, Saint Ciarán. (Ciarán is recorded as appearing hundreds of years after his death to smite a would-be raider with his crozier.)

  The crest of the crook has a series of animals apparently biting each other, but the most evocative aspect of the decoration is the snake-like animals in figure-of-eight patterns that decorate the sides. They are in a similar Ringerike-type style to that used for the wooden crook. Moreover, excavations at High Street in Dublin have unearthed bone trial pieces in which similar patterns have been practised by craftsmen. The likelihood is, therefore, that this crozier, a sacred Irish object dedicated to an ancient saint, was made in Dublin.

  If this seems surprising, it is only because of the power of the story created by his followers of Brian as the hammer of the Vikings, who freed Ireland from a terrible curse. Brian attempted to create a unitary kingdom, calling himself imperator Scottorum, emperor of the Irish. The Battle of Clontarf, in April 1014, was cast in later Irish history as the successful culmination of his attempts to expel the hated Viking invader forever. It was, in fact, an example of how Irish and Viking politics had become intertwined: about half of the troops fighting for Sitric Silkenbeard, the Dublin king, were Leinster allies; Sitric himself was Brian’s stepson and son-in-law, and was half-Irish; and far from wanting to extirpate Viking influence, Brian’s ambition was to incorporate the bustling towns of Limerick, Waterford and Dublin into his ‘empire’.

  He had already taken Dublin once, on 1 January 1000, returning it to Viking control when Sitric submitted as his vassal. Dublin thrived under this arrangement, until Sitric joined a wider Irish revolt against Brian. Nor was the Clontarf battle itself decisive: Brian’s forces did not manage to enter Dublin. Sitric (unlike Brian) survived and ruled Dublin until 1036. This is not to say that Clontarf was other than a highly significant event, one that was recalled for centuries throughout northern Europe; essentially it was a struggle for control of the lucrative Irish Sea trading network, with the powerful Orkney lord Sigurd the Stout taking the opportunity to muscle in on Dublin by supporting Sitric.

  Ironically, the real effect of the battle was to prevent a non-Irish Viking takeover of Dublin. The way was open for Dublin to be more fully integrated into the rest of Ireland. This crozier, probably made in the town after the Battle of Clontarf, embodies the way the force that once terrified the monks had become part of the Irish world.

  44. Cross of Cong, early-twelfth century

  This exquisite cross, which in the late-nineteenth century was in the possession of Fr Prendergast, the last abbot of Cong, Co. Mayo, was made c.1123, in Roscommon, probably for the diocescan centre of Tuam. The work is of the highest order: a core of oak, a large rock crystal, an elaborate mount and a flange decorated with gold filigree, niello (a deep-black mixture of metals) and blue and white glass studs. The cross chimes with other objects, such as the shrine of St Patrick’s Bell, the high crosses of Kilfenora and Dysert O’Dea and the sarcophagus at Cormac’s Chapel in Cashel, as expressions of a post-Viking Irish culture. All are heavily influenced by Hiberno-Norse design, in this case the so-called Urnes motifs (named after a site in Norway) of S-shaped animals interwoven with threadlike snakes.

  The cross is a typically eclectic object. The head of the beast that grips the base has been compared to German Romanesque models. At the same time, this is a culmination of a long tradition of Irish ecclesiastical metalwork. Dr Pat Wallace, former director of the National Museum, has described it as ‘both the last and one of the finest artistic efforts of our entire Early Christian period’. The cross’s significance, however, goes beyond its artistic beauty. It can be seen as a weapon in the endless struggle for overlordship in Ireland. This is not just a crucifix for church worship; it is a shrine designed for the public display in procession of the most prestigious of mediaeval relics: an alleged fragment of the True Cross on which Christ was crucified, originally contained behind the central crystal. The Cross of Cong is 76cm high, but in procession it was held even higher on a staff or pole. It was meant to invoke awe.

  The context for this is the vacuum in power that followed the Battle of Clontarf, which both curtailed the Vikings and ended the imperial ambitions of Brian Bóruma. The Irish annals mention cath Saxan, ‘the Battle of the English’—the Norman invasion of 1066 that would have momentous consequences for Ireland—but these noises off did not distract from the internal struggles for dominance. The Cross of Cong was commissioned by the king of Connacht, Toirrdelbach Ua Conchobair (Turlough O’Connor), who was attempting to establish himself as high king of Ireland. He mounted successful campaigns against Munster and Dublin. His overlordship was never uncontested, but it acquired a crucial claim to legitimacy when he was given a fragment of the True Cross, which
may have been brought to Ireland in 1123 as a means of encouraging (with limited success) Irish participation in Pope Calixtus II’s crusade to the Holy Land. The Cross of Cong is thus a direct product of both international and Irish political machinations.

  Not even the power of the True Cross, however, was enough to establish Toirrdelbach as a secure, centralised monarch of Ireland. Irish politics remained Byzantine and often bloody, with no one dynasty able to exert national control. This created a situation wide open to exploitation by opportunists already well entrenched across the Irish Sea.

  45. 'Strongbow's tomb', twelfth century

  After the English king Harold Godwinson was defeated by the invading forces of William the Bastard, duke of Normandy, at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, his royal banner was taken to Dublin by his fleeing sons. It ended up in the hands of the high king, Toirrdelbach Ua Briain. The image of the Irish king flaunting the banner of a defeated English sovereign has a tragicomic irony.