OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

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  • The Norman Conquest of Ireland

    Below is a short introductory essay by a modern scholar on the coming of the Normans to Ireland.

    Norman Conquest and Colonization

    Seán Duffy

    The Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland began with a trickle of mercenaries from South Wales landing in County Wexford in the summer of 1167, in aid of the exiled king of Leinster, Diarmait Mac Murchada; substantial reinforcements arrived two years later, who were intent on staying and winning Irish lands. The most famous of the invaders was Richard “Strongbow” de Clare, lord of Pembroke and Chepstow (Strigoil), who did not arrive until August 1170, when he married Mac Murchada’s daughter, claimed the right to succeed him as king of Leinster, and conquered Dublin from its Hiberno-Norse rulers. These latter events caused the reigning king of England, Henry II, to reassess the benign but “hands-off” stance that had hitherto characterized his response to the invasion. Since his youth, he had been interested in conquering Ireland himself and adding it to the many territories that were his Angevin “empire.” He had accepted Mac Murchada’s declaration of fealty, made in Aquitaine in 1166 to 1167, carrying the reciprocal duty to protect Diarmait from his enemies, and had authorized him to seek support from among Henry’s vassals.

    The problem was that Strongbow was an errant vassal, out of royal favor after having taken the wrong side in the civil war that preceded Henry’s accession. The latter had denied him the title of earl for his Welsh estates, and was hardly likely to allow him become king of Leinster, which Strongbow was intending to do following Mac Murchada’s death in May 1171. Attempts having failed to forbid Strongbow’s departure for Ireland, to call home his associates, and to blockade their supplies, Henry decided to come to Ireland, to regularize the position of Strongbow and the other adventurers who were making rapid strides there, and to oversee the conquest in person. And so, when he landed near Waterford on 17 October 1171, with five hundred knights and four thousand archers, Henry II became the first English king to enter Ireland.

    It was no glittering prize, although its Viking-founded towns were certainly an asset, and Henry was quick to take possession of them from Strongbow and his followers. Without its wealthy ports, especially Dublin, Leinster was a far less attractive acquisition, and hence Henry allowed Strongbow to hold it in return for supplying the military service of 100 knights. The kings of Thomond and Desmond, Ó Briain and Mac Carthaig, voluntarily came to Henry at Waterford and submitted to him, and most other important kings and prelates did likewise, the kings hoping that Henry might restrain the more acquisitive of the invaders (he did so, to a degree, for several years), while the clergy believed that the Irish church could be more successfully modernized if subjected to English influence, an arrangement formalized at the Synod of Cashel during Henry’s brief visit.

    However, Henry did not meet the high king, Ruaidrí Ó Conchobair (Rory O’Connor), and the Anglo-Norman settlement did not proceed easily when faced with his opposition, although his armies proved ineffective against the sophistication of the Norman military machine and the invulnerability to Irish assault of the castles with which they were busy dotting the landscape. A compromise was required, and in 1175 the “treaty” of Windsor was negotiated whereby Ruaidrí accepted the Anglo-Norman colony, which was confined within its existing boundaries (Leinster, Munster from Waterford to Dungarvan, and Meath, which Henry had given to Hugh de Lacy in 1172), while Henry acknowledged Ruaidrí as the paramount power elsewhere. However, this had little appeal for the land-hungry colonists and was soon abandoned in favor of a policy of all-out conquest, with speculative grants of Desmond and Thomond being made to favorites of the king, while John de Courcy won east Ulster for himself in 1177. In that year, a royal council was held at Oxford at which the youngest of Henry’s four sons, John, was made lord of Ireland. He was not expected to succeed to the throne, and so Henry envisaged a loose constitutional arrangement whereby Ireland would be ruled by a junior branch of the English royal family.

    It was 1185 before John visited Ireland, but his youthful folly in his dealings with the Irish kings alienated them from their new lord, who was busy building castles on Leinster’s frontier and granting lands in Munster to the ancestors of the Butlers and Burkes, while what is now County Louth was also taken from the Irish. In terms of fostering relations with the Irish, John’s expedition proved disastrous, but it did advance the conquest and saw the establishment in Ireland of a form of government modeled on that of England, a pattern that has prevailed. John’s later expedition in 1210 was hardly more productive since he was again inept in his treatment of the native rulers, although he reasserted his faltering authority over the colonists and further expanded the apparatus and reach of royal government. In the meantime, in 1199, John had ascended the throne, and hence the lordship of Ireland and kingship of England were, by an accident of history, reunited in the same person, as remained the case long thereafter.

    By the time of John’s second visit the country had been immeasurably transformed. The power of the Irish kings, except in the northwestern quadrant of the island, had been minimized, and their best ancestral lands taken from them by Anglo-Norman barons intent on expanding even further. They were able to do so by virtue of their advanced military equipment and tactics and their policy of encastellation. Beginning with rapidly erected timber structures atop earthen mounds (the motte-and-bailey), they were soon constructing massive stone fortresses like Trim and Carrickfergus, a sign for all to see that they were there to stay. But these would have meant nothing to the Irish if conquest were not followed by large-scale colonization. Only then, by the banishment of the native population from the fertile plains or their reduction to servile status, and the introduction of a new, loyal English population, could the colony feel secure and, just as important, provide a profit for those adventurers who had risked all on crossing the Irish Sea to start a new life.

    In the aftermath of the invasion, therefore, Ireland witnessed nothing short of an economic and agricultural revolution. The great lords parceled up their conquests among members of the lesser gentry from their homelands who were prepared to join them on this new frontier. The latter in turn persuaded others to follow suit (probably not too difficult at a time of population growth), and as each took ownership of their new estates, they enticed over their English and Welsh tenants, offering more attractive terms of tenure. They built new towns and boroughs and persuaded burgesses to inhabit them by less rigorous taxes and regulation. Just as towns needed merchants, traders, and craftsmen, so too manors needed laborers and parishes needed priests. Everything required to turn this new colony into a facsimile of England was found and shipped over from the neighboring isle, and within a generation or two the transformation was immense. But it was never complete. In the north and west, and in the uplands and bogs, the native Irish remained intact. Denied access to the law and treated as enemies in their own land, they remained a potential threat, and although the colony continued to expand until about the year 1300, its unfinished nature meant that an Irish resurgence was inevitable.

    Bibliography

    Cosgrove, Art, ed. A New History of Ireland. Vol. 2, Medieval Ireland, 1169–1534. 1987. Reprint, 1993.
    Duffy, Seán. Ireland in the Middle Ages. 1997.
    Flanagan, Marie Therese. Irish Society, Anglo-Norman Settlers, Angevin Kingship. 1989.
    Orpen, Goddard Henry, ed. The Song of Dermot and the Earl. 1892.
    Orpen, Goddard Henry. Ireland under the Normans. 4 vols. 1911–1920.
    Scott, Alexander Brian, and Francis Xavier Martin, eds. Expugnatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland by Giraldus Cambrensis. 1978.

  • Manuscript Writing and Illumination

    Below is a very useful introduction to the writing and illumination of manuscripts within the Irish Church, which I originally found online here.
    Manuscript Writing and Illumination

    Michael Ryan
    The promotion of Latin literacy was a high priority for the young Irish church, and later tradition frequently describes Saint Patrick leaving the necessary books in churches that he had founded. Saint Columba (Colmcille; died at Iona in 597 C.E.) was said to have been involved in a dispute in his youth about copying a new version of the psalter, and to have been copying a manuscript on his last day on earth. In later times some books were regarded as precious relics and enshrined in metal reliquaries—a practice that may have originated in an Irish reflex of the Roman tradition of keeping the book for papal masses in a sealed casket.
    Scholars have disputed the locations where important Irish manuscripts of the early medieval period were written. In some cases it is impossible to establish the provenance of a manuscript, so the term insular is often used in preference to more precise geographical ascriptions. The earliest extended text to survive from Ireland is the bundle of wax tablets from Springmount Bog, Co. Antrim, on which a student practiced the psalms in a script that owes much to late Roman cursive writing but is already distinctively Irish. The first almost complete manuscript that has come down to us is the Cathach of Saint Columba, a psalter, or book of the psalms, written on vellum in an Irish half-uncial script around the year 600 C.E. It was preserved until modern times by the O’Donnells (the saint’s kin). The Cathach already shows the principal stylistic traits of later Irish manuscripts. Psalms begin with an enlarged capital, often embellished, followed by letters of smaller size that diminish in height until they merge with the body of the text—the effect is called diminuendo. The ornament is very simple: Letters are enriched by spiral scrolls and simple trumpet devices in the La Tène tradition, and Christian symbols (a dolphin or fish and the cross) appear. (The La Tène style is an abstract art form based on stylized vegetal motifs, spirals, and curvilinear scrolls associated with the Iron Age Celtic peoples of mainland Europe, Ireland, and Britain.) A fragmentary gospel book of about the same date in Trinity College Library, Codex Usserianus Primus, has a singe leaf devoted entirely to a painted cross of eastern style with an abbreviated Chi-Rho (monogram of Christ) and alpha and omega. Nothing further is known of Irish manuscript production until the later seventh century, by which time Irish missions in north Britain and on the continent had created an entirely new climate. Influences from Anglo-Saxon England, Gaul, and probably Italy gave rise to a new eclectic ornamental style in monastic scriptoria.
    The first manifestation of the mature insular style is the Book of Durrow, a luxury codex of the New Testament with prefatory matter and canon tables, which was preserved at Durrow, Co. Offaly, until it was given to Trinity College in the seventeenth century. With its remarkable carpet pages devoted entirely to ornament and to the cross and its highly original depiction of the symbols of the evangelists (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the authors of the Gospels), it is a splendid hybrid. The spiral and trumpet scrolls of the La Tène tradition dominate its decoration—one carpet page is a remarkable evocation of the spirit of the bronzesmith and enameller. The initial letters and diminuendo of the Cathach have been recreated here with great virtuosity and magnificence. Interlace, varied in rhythm and color, makes its appearance for the first time in insular art. A page devoted to animal art of Germanic inspiration has led some to attribute the manuscript to Northumbria or Iona. The careful observer will see even on pages that are ostensibly wholly “Celtic” stylized animal heads, but expressed in the idiom of spirals and trumpets. Gospels are prefaced by whole-page representations of the evangelists’ symbols,and the genealogy of Christ in Matthew’s gospel is introduced by a finely decorated Chi-Rho.
    The Anglo-Saxon –style beasts have been compared to metalwork from the Sutton Hoo ship burial, suggesting an early seventh-century date for Durrow, but a late seventh-century date is more plausible. The arthistorical arguments can tell us nothing about provenance, for the style could well have been present in the Irish midlands in the seventh century. The Book of Durrow is associated with Columba, and it is clearly related to the tradition of the later Book of Kells. The style could conceivably have been practiced in Durrow, itself a Columban monastery. Probably, though, it was produced in Iona and belonged to a tradition that was intimately connected, as the evangelists’ symbols show, with the emergence of very similar beast symbols on Pictish carved stones, and in contact with both the Irish and Anglo-Saxon worlds.
    Two manuscripts now in Durham and probably originally in the monastery of Lindisfarne (founded by Aidan of Iona in the 630s) belong to the mixed traditions of Northumbrian Christianity, which owed much to Irish ecclesiastics. One of these shows the development of a more fluid animal style that would be greatly elaborated in the eighth century; the other has the imprint of a now lost crucifixion scene in which Christ’s body is enveloped in a tightly wound garment. This is the earliest evidence that painted scenes were part of the insular repertoire.
    The Lindisfarne Gospels, associated with the cult of Saint Cuthbert, are remarkable. The book may have been created for the translation of Cuthbert’s relics in 698 C.E. to Lindisfarne. It is the greatest and most elaborate of the earliest insular gospel books. Arthistorically, a date of about 700 C.E. for the manuscript is plausible. Its animal ornament with tightly wound, fabulous, but entirely believable interlaced beasts, its elegantly caricatured birds, a remarkable cross-carpet page, stunning zoomorphized spiral scrollwork, and beautiful script make the book a tour de force. Symbolism of beasts and birds is prominent, but its evangelist portraits, bearing the unmistakable impress of the Mediterranean culture of the monasteries of Monkwear-mouth and Jarrow, place this manuscript at the heart of the Northumbrian Renaissance. Nevertheless, the style of ornament is uncannily close to that of the Tara Brooch and Donore Hoard—both from eastern Ireland—and of the Hunterston Brooch from Ayrshire in Scotland (almost certainly of Irish manufacture). These seem to locate the origin of its decoration partly in the art of the metalworkers patronized by Irish potentates. The legacy of Lindisfarne is apparent in the greatly inferior Lichfield Gospels and in the persistence of elements of the La Tène style in later Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.
    Irish and Anglo-Saxon manuscript styles diverged during the eighth century. The sample of Irish survivors is very small, and only a few “pocket” gospel books are known. These have a smaller, often cursive script, simplified decoration of capitals, and charming if rather naïve evangelist portraits and symbols. Good examples are the Book of Mulling and the Book of Dimma in Trinity College and part of the Stowe Missal in the Royal Irish Academy—the latter almost certainly dates from after 800 C.E.
    Opinion is sharply divided on the date and origin of the famous Book of Kells. The current consensus is that it was created on the island of Iona toward the end of the eighth century. The book was probably brought to Kells, Co. Meath, a refuge of Columban monks from the Viking onslaught, in the tenth century C.E. It was at Kells in 1007 C.E. when it was stolen from the church and later found with the ornaments torn off the cover. The Annals of Ulster, recording both the theft and the recovery in that year, call it “the chief relic of the western world.” It was given to Trinity College in the seventeenth century. Though 340 folios survive, the book is incomplete. Kells has highly decorated canon tables, carpet pages, evangelist portraits and symbols, and figured scenes (the Temptation, the Virgin and Child, the Arrest of Christ)—all the work of a number of artists who employed with élan interlace, animal interlace, and beast ornament, especially of felines (lions?), birds, and serpents. There are vignettes in minor initials and interlinear paintings—an eagle seizing a fish, a warrior, chickens, and butterflies—some of which reflect on the adjacent text.
    Christological symbolism is everywhere. A particularly important page is devoted to the Chi-Rho that introduces the genealogy of Christ. This is a remarkable composition based on La Tène spirals and trumpets, combined with tiny illustrations of cats, mice, and butterflies, and other extraordinary displays of fine, almost microscopic decoration. A fragmentary manuscript in Turin may have approached Kells in ambition, and another in the Library of Sankt Gallen shared the Kells scriptorium’s interest in figured scenes, but neither approaches Kells in virtuosity and ornamental skill.
    In the ninth century a gospel book decorated with animal ornament, evangelist portraits, and fine geometric ornament was written by MacRegol, abbot of Birr (d. 822). It is preserved in the Bodleian Library. A much more elegant product is the Book of Armagh, created by the scribe Ferdomnach for the Abbot Torbach early in the ninth century. It contains the four gospels, documents relating to Saint Patrick, and a life of Saint Martin of Tours. Its elegant script and evangelist symbols are in black ink.
    The high style of manuscript production was dealt a fatal blow by the Viking wars of the ninth and tenth centuries, and later books do not approach in quality and ambition the work of the early period.
    Bibliography
    Alexander, J. J. G. Insular Illuminated Manuscripts, 6th to 9th Century. 1978.
    Fox, P., ed. The Book of Kells Ms 58 Trinity College Library Dublin. 1990.
    Henry, F. Irish Art in the Early Christian Period to AD 800. 1965.
    Henry, F. Irish Art during the Viking Invasions, 800–1020 AD. 1967.
    Meehan, B. The Book of Kells. 1994.
    Meehan, B. The Book of Durrow, a Medieval Masterpiece at Trinity College, Dublin. 1996.
    O’Mahoney, F., ed. The Book of Kells: Proceedings of a Conference at Trinity College, Dublin, 6–9 September, 1992. 1994.

  • Early and Medieval Irish Literature

     

    This essay by Barbara Hillers introduces Irish literature in the early and later medieval period.

     

    EARLY AND MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

    Barbara Hillers

    Early Irish literature stands out for its richness and excellence, encompassing not only a wide range of religious and secular poetry but also—uniquely in early medieval Europe—a flourishing prose literature. Its range and breadth reveals a vibrant vernacular culture, unafraid of either its native roots or of the Latin Christian culture of the Continent.

    Pre-modern literature in Irish is divided into periods on the basis of linguistic criteria: Old Irish (600–900), Middle Irish (900–1200), and Early Modern (or “Classical”) Irish (1200–1650). The transition from the Old Irish to the Middle Irish period, generally associated with the upheavals in the aftermath of the Viking incursions, was, in literary terms, less abrupt than the transition from Middle Irish to Early Modern Irish in the wake of the Anglo-Norman invasion.

    THE EARLY CENTURIES

    Literacy came to Ireland through contact with the Romano-Christian world. The practice of Christianity brought with it a knowledge of Latin; however, Irish played a significant role as a literary language in the church from an early date. The monks glossing Priscian’s Latin grammar in Irish used a technical vocabulary suited to describe both Latin and Irish grammar, and the same literate bilingualism informs the Old Irish primer Auraicept na n-Éces. Along with the clergy’s adoption of the vernacular went other aspects of traditional culture. While it is impossible to reconstruct the real nature of the encounter between missionary Christianity and native pagan culture, it is significant that in later tradition it is often portrayed as a conciliatory compromise. According to the preface of the native law code Senchas Már, Saint Patrick endorses the native laws, as long as they did not conflict with church law. Such anecdotes express the need that medieval scholars felt to legitimize elements of native culture, to baptize, as it were, their pre-Christian gods and heroes. Modern critics have been particularly fascinated by the native culture with its roots in a pre-Christian Celtic past. However, the traditional view of the “secular” parts of Irish literature—especially saga and law—as representing pagan survivals has largely been replaced by a new scholarly consensus that regards the entire literary production as emanating directly or indirectly from the monasteries.

    PROSE

    Ireland has the earliest developed prose tradition in medieval Europe. The preference for prose as a vehicle for narrative was such that when the verse epics of Virgil, Lucan, and Statius were translated into Irish, they were rendered into prose rather than verse. Early Irish prose covers a number of genres, including hagiography and homily, history, and translated literature, as well as heroic epic and myth. The narrative prose is characterized by a distinctive style particularly associated with heroic saga but found equally in saints’ lives and historical tales. Quick-paced action is offset by colorful, if impressionistic description and punctuated by memorable, often laconic dialogue. The themes, motifs, and narrative style of the sagas are traditional and may hark back to preliterate storytelling. The sagas are without exception anonymous. Their authors clearly did not think that they were inventing; they were retelling traditional subject matter in a traditional manner. They thought of themselves as historians and of their subject as history, albeit history told with the flair and gusto of heroic epic.

    POETRY

    Although the modern reader may find the prose literature more accessible, poetry had a higher prestige. Poems were regarded as individually authored. While prose texts are anonymous, poems were often attributed, and scores of Early Irish poets are known to us by name. Irish metrics are of dazzling complexity and variety. Much of the earliest poetry is stressed and alliterative. This poetry, referred to as rosc or retoiric, is generally regarded as the original poetic mode. Stressed verse was eclipsed by syllabic verse, which soon became the dominant mode for poetry, although stressed poetry continued to be composed for several centuries, particularly in contexts that invited an archaizing treatment (Breatnach 1996). From 1200 on, the bardic schools maintained a standard literary language and a sophisticated system of metrics; the contemporary metrical tracts distinguish scores of individual meters. Syllabic poetry employs a variety of ornamentation, including alliteration, assonance, and rhyme. The definition of rhyme differs from other European traditions: Phonemes do not have to be identical in order to rhyme, but must belong to the same group of “rhyming” letters.

    Modern scholarship has focused on the origins and development of Irish metrics. The lyric is well represented in anthologies (see, for example, Murphy 1956) and has received critical attention, especially the so-called “hermit” or “nature” poetry of monastic provenance; longer narrative and didactic verse fares less well. After 1200 the bulk of poetry is encomiastic.

    THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD

    Two events made the twelfth century a watershed in Irish literary history: the introduction of the continental monastic orders, heralded by the foundation of the Cistercian abbey of Mellifont in 1142, and the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169. The two events combined to shift the locus of native literary production from the monasteries to the bardic schools maintained by the dozen or so families of hereditary poets that formed the Irish intelligentsia. The bardic schools oversaw a linguistic reform that created a new literary standard after the profound linguistic changes of the Middle Irish period. This new standard language, referred to as “Classical” or “Early Modern” Irish, was used by literati from Gaelic Scotland to the south of Ireland and remained essentially unchanged until the collapse of Gaelic rule in the seventeenth century.

    The foreigners introduced new literary fashions; entertainment plays a larger part in the composition of prose. Anglo-Norman tastes are reflected by the Irish adaptations of Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton, of the Travels of John Mandeville and the Grail Quest. Poetry, on the other hand, remained essentially unassimilated and maintained its distinctive metrics. But even in poetry, foreign fashions had an impact; the dánta grádha (courtly love poetry) are informed by European love poetry and often have direct models in contemporary English poems. The first amateur practitioner of syllabic verse, the Anglo-Norman Gerald Fitzgerald, earl of Kildare, is an example of the much-invoked tendency for Ireland’s invaders to “go native,” becoming Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores (“more Irish than the Irish”). While relations between the two cultures were by no means always amicable, a cultural regrouping beginning in the thirteenth century resulted in many Anglo-Norman lords patronizing native poets. One poet, Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh, explains in a poem how he flattered native and foreign nobility alike. The poets, themselves of the aristocracy, looked at their profession as an independent institution that endowed them with the right to counsel and censure as well as praise their lords. Nevertheless, in economic terms they were largely dependent on the bounty of their patrons, whose careers they celebrated and whose deaths they lamented. Such official eulogies were preserved in a duanaire (poem book). A good many poem books survive, and the contents of a number of these have been published, as have the repertoires of individual poets, such as the exemplary edition of the oeuvre of Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn (Knott 1922 and 1926).

    Throughout its long history, Irish literature weathered major political upheavals and successfully accommodated foreign influence, be it Latin, Norse, or Norman. It was only when the Anglo expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to the disestablishment of Gaelic rule that Irish ceased, for a couple of centuries, to be a literary language.

    Bibliography

    Breatnach, Liam. “Poets and Poetry.” In Progress in Medieval Irish Studies, edited by Kim McCone and Katharine Simms. 1996.

    Flower, Robin. The Irish Tradition. 1947.

    Knott, Eleanor. Irish Classical Poetry. 1957.

    Knott, Eleanor, ed. and trans. The Bardic Poems of Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn. 2 vols. 1922 and 1926.

    McCone, Kim, and Katharine Simms, eds. Progress in Medieval Irish Studies. 1996.

    Murphy, Gerard. Early Irish Lyrics. 1956.

    Williams, J. E. C., and Patrick Ford. The Irish Literary Tradition. 1992.