by Tim Severin
After the fourth or fifth of these self-important little cavalcades had splashed past us, the hooves of their horses sprinkling us with muddy water from the puddles, I ventured to ask Donnachad why the ri tuathre travelled with such large escorts when the land seemed so peaceful.
'It would be very wrong for a ri tuathre to travel alone. It would diminish the price of his face,' Donnachad answered.
'The price of his face?' I enquired. Donnachad had said 'log n-enech', and I knew no other way to translate it.
'The price of his honour, his worth. Every man has a value whenever he is judged, either in front of the arbitrators or by his own people, and a ri' - and here he sucked in his breath and tried to look a little more regal, though that was difficult in his shabby and mud-spattered clothes - 'should always act in measure with the price of his face. Otherwise there would be anarchy and ruin in his tuath.'
'So what would be the price of Cormac's face?' I meant this as a joke. I had noted that the Irish have a quick sense of humour and Cormac, one of Donnachad's cliathaires, was particularly ugly. He had bulging eyes, broad flat nostrils, and an unfortunate birthmark running down the left side of his face from his ear to disappear under his shirt collar. But Donnachad took my question entirely seriously. 'Cormac is a cow-freeman of good standing — he has a half-share in a plough team — so his face price is two and a half milch cows, rather less than one cumal. He renders me the value of one milch cow in rent every year.'
I decided to take my luck a little further. A cumal is a female slave, and Donnachad's reply would have some bearing on my own future as his property. 'Forgive me if I am being impolite,' I said, 'but do you also have a face price? And how would other people know what it was?'
'Everyone knows the face price of every man, his wife and his family,' he answered without even a moment's pause for thought, 'from the ri tuathre whom we saw just now, whose honour is eight cumals, to a lad still living on his parent's land whose face would be valued at a yearling heifer.'
'Do I have a face price too?'
'No. You are doer, unfree, and therefore you have neither price nor honour. Unless, that is, you manage to obtain your freedom and then by hard work and thrift you accumulate enough wealth. But it is easier to lose face price than to gain it. A ri endangers his honour if he even lays his hand to any implement that has a handle, be it hammer, axe or spade.'
'Does that include using a sword hilt as a mallet?' I could not refrain from answering, and Donnachad gave me a cuff around the head.
It was on the fourth day of our walk that I had my most notable encounter with this strange Irish notion of face price. We came to a small village where normally we might have stopped and bought some food. Instead we marched straight forward even though, as I knew, our supplies were running low. The brisk pace made my
back hurt. It was still sore from the blow received in the battle, but my companions merely told me to hurry up and not delay them and that I would soon have medicine to reduce the pain. They quickened their pace and looked distinctly cheerful as if anticipating some happy event. Shortly afterwards we came in sight of a building, larger than the usual farmhouse and set much closer to the road. I saw that it had a few small outhouses, but there were no cattle stalls nor any sign of farming activity around it. Nor did it have a defensive palisade. On the contrary, the building looked open to all and very welcoming. Without a moment's hesitation my companions veered from the track, approached the big main door and, barely pausing to knock, pushed their way inside. We were in a large, comfortable room arrayed with benches and seats. In the centre of the room a steaming cauldron hung over a fire pit. A man who was evidently the owner of this establishment came forward to greet Donnachad most warmly. Using several phrases of formal welcome, he invited him to sit down and take his ease after the weariness of the highway. He then turned to each of the cliathaires — ignoring me and Donnachad's servant, of course — and invited them likewise. Scarcely had our group found their seats than our host was providing them with flagons of mead and beer. These drinks were soon followed by loaves of bread, a small churn of butter and some dried meat. There was even some food for myself and Donnachad's elderly servant.
I ate quickly, expecting that we would soon be on our way. But to my puzzlement Donnachad and his cliathaires appeared to be settling in to enjoy themselves. Their host promised them a hot meal as soon as his cook had fired the oven. Then he served more drinks, followed by the meal itself, and afterwards made another liberal distribution of mead and beer. By then the cliathaires had settled down to story-telling, a favourite pastime among the Irish, where — as at Earl Sigurd's Jol feast in Orkney — each person at a gathering is expected to tell a tale to keep the others entertained. All this time more travellers had been entering the room, and they too were seated and fed. By nightfall the room was full to capacity, and it was obvious to me that our little party would be spending the night at this strange house.
'Who is the owner of the house? Is he a member of Donnachad's tuath?' I asked Donnachad's servant.
He was already drowsy with tiredness and strong drink. 'Doesn't even come from these parts originally. Set up here maybe four years ago, and is doing very well,' the old man replied with a gentle hiccup.
'You mean he sells food and drink to travellers, and is making his fortune?'
'No, not making his fortune, spending his fortune,' the old-timer answered. 'He's made his fortune already, cattle farming somewhere to the north, I think. Now he's earning a much higher face price and he well deserves it.' I thought the old fellow's wits were fuddled and gave up the questions. There would be a better time to solve the mystery in the morning.
In fact next morning was not the right time to ask questions either. Everyone had fierce headaches, and the sun was already high before we were ready to set out on the road again. I loitered, waiting for Donnachad to pay our host for all the food and drink we had consumed, but he made no move to do so, and our host seemed just as good-natured as when we first arrived. Donnachad muttered only a few gracious phrases of thanks and then we rejoined his men, who were trudging blearily forward. I sidled across to the elderly servant and asked him why we had left without paying. 'You never pay a briugu for hospitality,' he answered, mildly shocked. 'That would be an insult. Might even take you to court for looking to pay him.'
'In Iceland, where I come from,' I said, 'a farmer is expected to be hospitable and give shelter and food to travellers who come to his door, particularly if he is wealthy and can afford it. But I didn't see any farming near the house. I'm surprised that he doesn't move away to somewhere a bit more remote.'
'That's precisely why he's built his house beside the road,' explained the old man, 'so that as many people as possible can visit him. And the more hospitality he dispenses, the higher will rise his face price. That's how he can increase his honour, which is much more important to him than the amount of wealth he has accumulated.'
What the briugu would do when all his hoarded savings ran out, he did not explain. 'A briugu should possess only three things,' concluded the old man with one of those pithy sayings of which the Irish are fond, 'a never-dry cauldron, a dwelling on a public road and a welcome for every face.'
We arrived at Donnachad's tuath in the second week of Beltane, the month which in Iceland I had known as Lambfold-time. After trudging halfway across Ireland in the mud with Donnachad and his slightly shabby band, I was not expecting Donnachad's home to be very grand. Even so, its air of threadbare poverty was flagrant. His dwelling was merely a small circular building with walls of wattle and daub and a conical thatch roof, and the interior was more sparsely furnished than the briugu's roadside hostel. There were a few stools and benches, and the sleeping arrangements were thin mattresses stuffed with dried bracken, while the beaten-earth floor was covered with rushes. Outside were some cattle byres, a granary and a small smithy. There was also a short line of stables of which Donnachad was proud, though there were no horses in them at the pres
ent moment.
From the conversation of his cliathaires I gathered that Donnachad and his warriors had gone to fight alongside the Irish High King not from loyalty, but in the hope of bringing back enough booty to improve the hardship of their daily lives. The land on which their clan or fine lived was unproductive at the best of times, being waterlogged and boggy, and there had been so much rain during the last three summers that their ploughings had been flooded and the crops ruined. At the same time a recurring murrain had afflicted their cattle herds, and because petty kings like Donnachad and his chief farmers counted their wealth in cattle, this loss had brought them very low. The victory at the weir of Clontarf, as the battle was now being called, had been the only cheerful event in the past five years.
Donnachad put me to work as a field labourer, and he treated me fairly, even though I was a slave. He allowed me rest time at noon and in the evening, and the food he provided - coarse bread, butter and cheese, and an occasional dish of meat - was not much different from his own diet. He had a wife and five children, and the homespun clothes they wore were a sign of their very reduced means. Yet I never saw Donnachad turn away any stranger who came to the farm — the Irish expectation of hospitality extended farther than the briugus - and twice during that summer I was called in as a house servant when Donnachad entertained his clansmen at the banquets which they expected from a man with his log n-enech. The food and mead, I knew, were almost everything that Donnachad held in his storerooms.
That summer in the open air, herding cattle, minding sheep and pigs, making and mending fences, changed me physically and mentally. I filled out and grew in strength, my back healed, and my command of the Irish improved rapidly. I found I had a gift for learning a language quickly. The only disappointment was that my injured hand still troubled me. Though I flexed and massaged it, the fingers remained stiff and awkward, and it was a particular handicap when I had to grip a spade handle to cut and stack turf for Donnachad's winter fire or grapple with boulders that we pulled from the rough fields and heaped into boundary walls.
The harvest was poor but not disastrous, and soon afterwards I began to notice that Donnachad was showing signs of gathering anxiety. His normally cheerful conversation dried up, and he would sit for an hour at a time, looking worried and distracted. In the night I woke occasionally to hear the low murmur of voices as he talked with his wife, Sinead, in the curtained-off section of the house they called their bed chamber. In the scraps of their conversation I often heard a word I did not know — manchuine — and when I asked its meaning from Marcan, the elderly servant, he grimaced. 'It's the tax Donnachad must pay to the monastery in the autumn. It's levied every year, and for the past five years Donnachad has not been able to pay. The monastery allowed him more time, but now the debt has grown so large that it will take years to clear, if ever.'
'Why does Donnachad owe money to a monastery?' I asked.
'A small tuath like ours must have an over-ruler,' Marcan replied. 'We are too small to survive on our own, and so we pledge allegiance to a king who can give us protection when we need it, in a local war or a dispute over boundary lands or something of the sort. We give the over-king our support, and he gains in honour if he is acknowledged as over-king to several tuaths. Also he supplies us with cattle which we look after for him. At the end of the farming year we give back an agreed amount of interest, in goods such as milk and cheese or calves, and we do some service for him.'
'But how does a monastery get involved in all this?'
'The arrangement seemed sensible when Donnachad's grandfather made it. He thought the abb would be a more considerate overlord than our previous ri tuathre, who was always asking us to provide him with soldiers for his endless squabbles with other ri tuathre, or he would suddenly show up with a band of his retainers and stay for two or three weeks, treating our houses as his own and generally reducing us to beggary. Donnachad's grandfather came up with the notion of transferring our loyalty to a monastery. The monks weren't going to ask for soldiers to join in their wars, and they wouldn't come visiting so often either.'
'So what went wrong?'
'The new arrangement worked well for nearly twenty years,' Marcan replied. 'But then the new abb got grand ideas. He and his advisers began claiming a special sanctity for their own saint. He must have precedence over other monasteries with their patron saints. The abb started bringing in stonemasons and labourers to build new chapels and erect imposing monuments, and he began to purchase expensive altar cloths and employ the best jewellers to design and make fancy church fittings. It all cost a great deal.' More log n-enech, I thought.
'That was when the monastery treasurer began asking for increased returns on the cattle that had been loaned to us and, as you know, our cattle herding has not been lucky. Next, his successor came up with a new way of raising revenue. The monks now go on a circuit of their tuaths every autumn, bringing with them their holy relics to show the people. They expect the faithful to provide them with the manchuine, the monastery tax, so that the abb can continue the building programme. If you ask me, it will take another couple of generations for the job to be done. They're even asking for money to pay for missionaries whom the monks will send abroad to foreign countries.'
Marcan's remark about the missionaries reminded me of Thang-brand, King Olaf s belligerent missionary to Iceland, who had made such a nuisance of himself. But I wasn't sure of the old man's religious views so I kept silent.
'When are the priests due to make their next visit?'
'Ciaran is their special saint and the ninth day of September is his feast. So we'll probably see them in the next couple of weeks. But one thing's sure: Donnachad won't be able to settle the debt that the tuath owes.'
For some reason I expected St Ciaran's relics to be part of the saint — a thigh bone and a skull, perhaps. I had heard rumours that White Christ people revered these macabre remnants. But it turned out that the relics which the monks brought with them ten days later were much less personal. They were the crooked head of a bishop's staff and a leather satchel, which, they claimed, still held the Bible that their saint had studied. Certainly the crozier was proof of Marcan's assertion that the monastery had spent huge sums on glorifying their saint. The bent scrap of ancient wood was enshrined in a magnificent filigreed case of silver gilt, studded with precious stones and cleverly fashioned into the shape of a horse's head. This, the monks claimed, was the staff that Ciaran himself had used, and they held up the glittering ornament for all of us who gathered outside Donnachad's house to see and revere.
Strangely, they were even more reverential of the book. They affirmed that it was the very same miraculous volume that Ciaran had always carried with him, studying it at every available moment, rising at first light to begin reading, and poring over its pages far into the night, rarely setting it aside. And, unwittingly, they reminded me of the day my mother's hay had failed to dry after the downpour of rain at Frodriver, as they recounted the tale of how Ciaran had been sitting outside his cell one day when he was unexpectedly called away. Thoughtlessly he placed the book on the ground, lying open with its pages exposed to the sky. In his absence, a heavy shower had fallen; when he came back to collect the book all the ground was sodden wet, but the fragile pages were bone dry and not a line of the ink had run.
To prove it to us, the monks unfastened the satchel's leather thongs, solemnly withdrew the book and reverentially showed us the pristine pages.
Such tales made a great impression on Donnachad's people, even if they were not capable of reading and had no idea how to judge the age of the book. It made for an awkward interview as the little party of monks in their drab gowns stood in the centre the earth floor of Donnachad's home and asked for payment of their dues. The abb, or abbot, was represented by the treasurer, a tall, lugubrious man who exuded a sense of sad finality as he made his request. From where I was standing against the side wall with Marcan, I saw that Donnachad looked embarrassed and ashamed. I guessed that h
is log n-enech was at stake. Humbly Donnachad asked the monks to allow him and his people to pay off their obligation in small stages. He explained how the harvest had been a disappointment once again, but he would gather together as much produce as could be spared and deliver the food to the monastery throughout the coming winter. Then he delivered his pledge: as an earnest of his intention he would loan to the monastery his only slave, so the value of my work would be a surety to set against the annual debt.
The sad-looking treasurer looked at me where I stood against the far wall. I no longer wore a chain or manacles, but the scars on my wrists made my status obvious. 'Very well,' he said, 'we will accept the young man to come to work for us on loan, though it is not our custom to employ slaves in a monastery. However, the blessed Patrick himself was a slave once, so there is a precedent.' And with that I passed from the ownership of Donnachad, ri tuathe of the Ua Dalaigh, into the possession of the monks of St Ciaran's foundation.
