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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
No. 6
_Editors_:
HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.
PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, LITT.D., LL.D., F.B.A.
PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.
PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
_VOLUMES NOW READY_
HISTORY OF WAR AND PEACE G.H. PERRIS
POLAR EXPLORATION DR. W.S. BRUCE, LL.D., F.R.S.E.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION HILAIRE BELLOC, M.P.
THE STOCK EXCHANGE: A SHORT STUDY OF INVESTMENT AND SPECULATION
F.W. HIRST
IRISH NATIONALITY ALICE STOPFORD GREEN
THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, M.P.
PARLIAMENT: ITS HISTORY, CONSTITUTION, AND PRACTICE
SIR COURTNAY ILBERT, K.C.B., K.C.S.I.
MODERN GEOGRAPHY MARION I. NEWBIGIN, D.S.C. (Lond.)
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE JOHN MASEFIELD
THE EVOLUTION OF PLANTS D.H. SCOTT, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S.
_VOLUMES READY IN JULY_
THE OPENING-UP OF AFRICA
SIR H.H. JOHNSTON, G.C.M.G., K.C.B., D.SC., F.Z.S.
MEDIAEVAL EUROPE H.W.C. DAVIS, M.A.
MOHAMMEDANISM D.S. MARGOLIOUTH, M.A., D.LITT.
THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH J.A. HOBSON, M.A.
HEALTH AND DISEASE W. LESLIE MACKENZIE, M.D.
INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS A.N. WHITEHEAD, SC.D., F.R.S.
THE ANIMAL WORLD F.W. GAMBLE, D.SC., F.R.S.
EVOLUTION J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., and
PATRICK GEDDES, M.A.
LIBERALISM L.T. HOBHOUSE, M.A.
CRIME AND INSANITY DR. C.A. MERCIER, F.R.C.P., F.R.C.S.
*** Other volumes in active preparation
IRISH
NATIONALITY
BY
ALICE STOPFORD GREEN
AUTHOR OF "TOWN LIFE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY"
"HENRY II," "THE MAKING OF IRELAND," ETC.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
LONDON
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
COPYRIGHT, 1911,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I THE GAELS IN IRELAND 7
II IRELAND AND EUROPE 29
III THE IRISH MISSION 40
IV SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 57
V THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL 77
VI THE NORMAN INVASION 96
VII THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL 111
VIII THE TAKING OF THE LAND 125
IX THE NATIONAL FAITH OF THE IRISH 141
X RULE OF THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT 158
XI THE RISE OF A NEW IRELAND 182
XII AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 198
XIII IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 219
SOME IRISH WRITERS ON IRISH HISTORY 255
IN MEMORY
OF
THE IRISH DEAD
IRISH NATIONALITY
CHAPTER I
THE GAELS IN IRELAND
Ireland lies the last outpost of Europe against the vast flood of the
Atlantic Ocean; unlike all other islands it is circled round with
mountains, whose precipitous cliffs rising sheer above the water stand
as bulwarks thrown up against the immeasurable sea.
It is commonly supposed that the fortunes of the island and its
civilisation must by nature hang on those of England. Neither history
nor geography allows this theory. The life of the two countries was
widely separated. Great Britain lay turned to the east; her harbours
opened to the sunrising, and her first traffic was across the narrow
waters of the Channel and the German Sea. But Ireland had another
aspect; her natural harbours swelled with the waves of the Atlantic,
her outlook was over the ocean, and long before history begins her
sailors braved the perils of the Gaulish sea. The peoples of Britain,
Celts and English, came to her from the opposite lowland coasts; the
people of Ireland crossed a wider ocean-track, from northern France to
the shores of the Bay of Biscay. The two islands had a different
history; their trade-routes were not the same; they lived apart, and
developed apart their civilisations.
We do not know when the Gaels first entered Ireland, coming according
to ancient Irish legends across the Gaulish sea. One invasion followed
another, and an old Irish tract gives the definite Gaelic monarchy as
beginning in the fourth century B.C. They drove the earlier peoples,
the Iberians, from the stupendous stone forts and earthen entrenchments
that guarded cliffs and mountain passes. The name of Erin recalls the
ancient inhabitants, who lived on under the new rulers, more in number
than their conquerors. The Gaels gave their language and their
organisation to the country, while many customs and traditions of the
older race lingered on and penetrated the new people.
Over a thousand years of undisturbed life lay before the Gaels, from
about 300 B.C. to 800 A.D. The Roman Empire which overran Great Britain
left Ireland outside it. The barbarians who swept over the provinces of
the empire and reached to the great Roman Wall never crossed the Irish
Sea.
Out of the grouping of the tribes there emerged a division of the
island into districts made up of many peoples. Each of the provinces
later known as Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connacht had its stretch
of seaboard and harbours, its lakes and rivers for fishing, its
mountain strongholds, its hill pastures, and its share of the rich
central plain, where the cattle from the mountains "used to go in
their running crowds to the smooth plains of the province, towards
their sheds and their full cattle-fields." All met in the middle of
the island, at the Hill of Usnech, where the Stone of Division still
stands. There the high-king held his court, as the chief lord in the
confederation of the many states. The rich lands of Meath were the
high-king's domain.
Heroic tales celebrate the prehistoric conflicts as of giants by which
the peoples fixed the boundaries of their power. They tell of Conor
Mac Nessa who began to reign in the year that Mark Antony and
Cleopatra died, and of his sister's son Cuchulain, the champion of the
north, who went out to battle from the vast entrenchments still seen
in Emain Macha near Armagh. Against him Queen Maeve gathered at her
majestic fort of Rathcroghan in Roscommon fifteen hundred royal
mercenaries and Gaulish soldiers--a woman comely and white-faced, with
gold yellow hair, her crimson cloak fastened at the breast with a gold
pin, and a spear flaming in her hand, as she led her troops across the
Boyne. The battles of the heroes on the Boyne and the fields of Louth,
the thronged entrenchments that thicken round the Gap of the North and
the mountain pass from Dundalk and Newry into the plains of Armagh and
Tyrone, show how the soldiers' line of march was the same from the
days of Cuchulain to those of William of Orange. The story tells how
the whole island shared in the great conflict, to the extreme point of
Munster, where a rival of Cuchulain, Curoi son of Dare, had sent his
knights and warriors through all Ireland to seek out the greatest
stones for his fortress, on a shelf of rock over two thousand feet
above the sea near Tralee. The Dublin Museum preserves relics of that
heroic time, the trappings of war-chariots and horses, arms and
ornaments.
Amid such conflicts the Connacht kings pressed eastward from Usnech to
Tara, and fixed there the centre of Irish life.
The Gaelic conquerors had entered on a wealthy land. Irish chroniclers
told of a vast antiquity, with a shadowy line of monarchs reaching
back, as they boasted, for some two thousand years before Christ: they
had legends of lakes springing forth in due order; of lowlands cleared
of wood, the appearance of rivers, the making of roads and causeways,
the first digging of wells: of the making of forts; of invasions and
battles and plagues. They told of the smelting of gold near the Liffey
about 1500 B.C. and of the Wicklow artificer who made cups and
brooches of gold and silver, and silver shields, and golden chains for
the necks of kings; and of the discovery of dyes, purple and blue and
green, and how the ranks of men were distinguished henceforth by the
colour of their raiment. They had traditions of foreign trade--of an
artificer drowned while bringing golden ore from Spain, and of torques
of gold from oversea, and of a lady's hair all ablaze with Alpine gold.
Later researches have in fact shown that Irish commerce went back some
fifteen hundred years before our era, that it was the most famous
gold-producing country of the west, that mines of copper and silver
were worked, and that a race of goldsmiths probably carried on the
manufacture of bronze and gold on what is now the bog of Cullen. Some
five hundred golden ornaments of old times have been gathered together
in the Dublin Museum in the last eighty years, a scanty remnant of what
have been lost or melted down; their weight is five hundred and seventy
ounces against a weight of twenty ounces in the British Museum from
England, Scotland, and Wales.
The earth too was fruitful. The new settlers, who used iron tools
instead of bronze, could clear forests and open plains for tillage.
Agriculture was their pride, and their legends told of stretches of
corn so great that deer could shelter in them from the hounds, and
nobles and queens drove chariots along their far-reaching lines, while
multitudes of reapers were at work cutting the heads of the grain with
the little sickles which we may still see in the Dublin Museum.
But to the Irish the main interest of the Gaels lies in their
conception of how to create an enduring state or nation.
The tribal system has been much derided as the mark of a savage
people, or at least of a race unable to advance beyond political
infancy into a real national existence. This was not true of the
Gaels. Their essential idea of a state, and the mode of its government
and preservation, was different from that of mediaeval Europe, but it
was not uncivilised.
The Roman Empire stamped on the minds of its subject peoples, and on
the Teutonic barbarians who became its heirs, the notion of a state
as an organisation held together, defended, governed and policed, by a
central ruler; while the sovereign was supreme in the domain of force
and maintenance of order, whatever lay outside that domain--art,
learning, history and the like--were secondary matters which might be
left to the people. The essential life of the nation came to be
expressed in the will and power of its master.
The Gaelic idea was a wholly different one. The law with them was the
law of the people. They never lost their trust in it. Hence they never
exalted a central authority, for their law needed no such sanction.
While the code was one for the whole race, the administration on the
other hand was divided into the widest possible range of
self-governing communities, which were bound together in a willing
federation. The forces of union were not material but spiritual, and
the life of the people consisted not in its military cohesion but in
its joint spiritual inheritance--in the union of those who shared the
same tradition, the same glorious memory of heroes, the same
unquestioned law, and the same pride of literature. Such an instinct
of national life was neither rude nor contemptible, nor need we
despise it because it was opposed to the theory of the middle ages in
Europe. At the least the Irish tribal scheme of government contained
as much promise of human virtue and happiness as the feudal scheme
which became later the political creed of England, but which was never
accepted in Ireland. Irish history can only be understood by realising
this intense national life with its sure basis on the broad
self-government of the people.
Each tribe was supreme within its own borders; it elected its own
chief, and could depose him if he acted against law. The land belonged
to the whole community, which kept exact pedigrees of the families who
had a right to share in the ground for tillage or in the mountain
pasturage; and the chief had no power over the soil save as the
elected trustee of the people. The privileges of the various chiefs,
judges, captains, historians, poets, and so on, were handed down from
generation to generation. In all these matters no external power could
interfere. The tribe owed to the greater tribe above it nothing but
certain fixed dues, such as aid in road-making, in war, in ransom of
prisoners and the like.
The same right of self-government extended through the whole hierarchy
of states up to the Ardri or high-king at the head. The "hearth of
Tara" was the centre of all the Gaelic states, and the demesne of the
Ardri. "This then is my fostermother," said the ancient sage, "the
island in which ye are, even Ireland, and the familiar knee of this
island is the hill on which ye are, namely, Tara." There the Ardri was
crowned at the pillar-post. At Tara, "the fort of poets and learned
men," the people of all Ireland gathered at the beginning of each
high-king's reign, and were entertained for seven days and
nights--kings and ollaves together round the high-king, warriors and
reavers, together, the youths and maidens and the proud foolish folk
in the chambers round the doors, while outside was for young men and
maidens because their mirth used to entertain them. Huge earthen banks
still mark the site of the great Hall, seven hundred and sixty feet
long and ninety feet wide, with seven doors to east and as many more
to west; where kings and chiefs sat each under his own shield, in
crimson cloaks with gold brooches, with girdles and shoes of gold, and
spears with golden sockets and rivets of red bronze. The Ardri,
supreme lord and arbitrator among them, was surrounded by his
councillors--the law-men or brehons, the bards and chroniclers, and
the druids, teachers and men of science. He was the representative of
the whole national life. But his power rested on the tradition of the
people and on the consent of the tribes. He could impose no new law;
he could demand no service outside the law.
The political bond of union, which seemed so loose, drew all its
strength from a body of national tradition, and a universal code of
law, which represented as it were the common mind of the people, the
spontaneous creation of the race. Separate and independent as the
tribes were, all accepted the one code which had been fashioned in the
course of ages by the genius of the people. The same law was recited
in every tribal assembly. The same traditions and genealogies bound
the tribes together as having a single heritage of heroic descent and
fame. The preservation of their common history was the concern of the
whole people. One of the tales pictures their gathering at Tara, when
before the men of Ireland the ancients related their history, and
Ireland's chief scholars heard and corrected them by the best
tradition. "Victory and blessings attend you, noble sirs," the men of
Erin said; "for such instruction it was meet that we should gather
ourselves together." And at the reciting of the historic glories of
their past, the whole congregation arose up together "for in their
eyes it was an augmenting of the spirit and an enlargement of the
mind."
To preserve this national tradition a learned class was carefully
trained. There were schools of lawyers to expound the law; schools of
historians to preserve the genealogies, the boundaries of lands, and
the rights of classes and families; and schools of poets to recite the
traditions of the race. The learned men were paid at first by the
gifts of the people, but the chief among them were later endowed with
a settled share of the tribe land in perpetuity. So long as the
family held the land, they were bound to train up in each generation
that one of the household who was most fit to carry on learning, and
thus for centuries long lines of distinguished men added fame to their
country and drew to its schools students from far and wide. Through
their work the spirit of the Irish found national expression in a code
of law which showed not only extraordinarily acute and trained
intelligence but a true sense of equity, in a literary language of
great richness and of the utmost musical beauty, and in a system of
metrical rules for poets shaped with infinite skill. The Irish nation
had a pride in its language beyond any people in Europe outside of the
Greeks and Romans.
While each tribe had its schools, these were linked together in a
national system. Professors of every school were free of the island;
it was the warrior's duty to protect them as they moved from court to
court. An ancient tale tells how the chiefs of Emain near Armagh
placed sentinels along the Gap of the North to turn back every poet
who sought to leave the country and to bring on their way with honour
every one who sought to enter in. There was no stagnation where
competition extended over the whole island. The greatest of the
teachers were given the dignity of "Professors of all the Gaels."
Learned men in their degrees ranked with kings and chiefs, and
high-professors sat by the high-king and shared his honours. The king,
said the laws, "could by his mere word decide against every class of
persons except those of the two orders of religion and learning, who
are of equal value with himself."
It is in this exaltation of learning in the national life that we must
look for the real significance of Irish history--the idea of a society
loosely held in a political sense, but bound together in a spiritual
union. The assemblies which took place in every province and every
petty state were the guarantees of the national civilization. They were
periodical exhibitions of everything the people esteemed--democracy,
aristocracy, king-craft, literature, tradition, art, commerce, law,
sport, religion, display, even rustic buffoonery. The years between one
festival and another were spent in serious preparation for the next; a
multitude of maxims were drawn up to direct the conduct of the people.
So deeply was their importance felt that the Irish kept the tradition
diligently, and even in the darkest times of their history, down to the
seventeenth century, still gathered to "meetings on hills" to exercise
their law and hear their learned men.
In the time of the Roman Empire, therefore, the Irish looked on
themselves as one race, obedient to one law, united in one culture and
belonging to one country. Their unity is symbolised by the great
genealogical compilations in which all the Gaels are traced to one
ancestry, and in the collections of topographical legends dealing with
hundreds of places, where every nook and corner of the island is
supposed to be of interest to the whole of Ireland. The tribal
boundaries were limits to the material power of a chief and to that
only: they were no barriers to the national thought or union. The
learned man of the clan was the learned man of the Gaelic race. By all
the higher matters of language and learning, of equity and history,
the people of Ireland were one. A noble figure told the unity of
their land within the circuit of the ocean. The Three Waves of Erin,
they said, smote upon the shore with a foreboding roar when danger
threatened the island; Cleena's wave called to Munster at an inlet
near Cork, while Tonn Rury at Dundrum and Tonn Tuaithe at the mouth of
the Bann sounded to the men of Ulster.
The weaknesses of the Irish system are apparent. The numerous small
territories were tempted, like larger European states, to raid
borders, to snatch land or booty, and to suffer some expense of
trained soldiers. Candidates for the chiefdom had to show their
fitness, and "a young lord's first spoil" was a necessary exploit.
There were wild plundering raids in the summer nights; disorders were
multiplied. A country divided in government was weakened for purposes
of offence, or for joint action in military matters. These evils were
genuine, but they have been exaggerated. Common action was hindered,
not mainly by human contentions, but by the forests and marshes, lakes
and rivers in flood that lay over a country heavy with Atlantic
clouds. Riots and forays there were, among a martial race and strong
men of hot passions, but Ireland was in fact no prominent example of
mediaeval anarchy or disorder. Local feuds were no greater than those
which afflicted England down to the Norman Conquest and long after it;
and which marked the life of European states and cities through the
middle ages. The professional war bands of Fiana that hired themselves
out from time to time were controlled and recognised by law, and had
their special organisation and rites and rules of war. It has been
supposed that in the passion of tribal disputes men mostly perished by
murder and battle-slaughter, and the life of every generation was by
violence shortened to less than the common average of thirty years.
Irish genealogies prove on the contrary that the generations must be
counted at from thirty-three to thirty-six years: the tale of kings,
judges, poets, and householders who died peacefully in an honoured old
age, or from some natural accident, outruns the list of sudden murders
or deaths in battle. Historical evidence moreover shows us a country
of widening cornfields, or growing commerce, where wealth was
gathered, where art and learning swept like a passion over the people,
and schools covered the land. Such industries and virtues do not
flourish in regions given over to savage strife. And it is significant
that Irish chiefs who made great wars hired professional soldiers from
oversea.
If the disorders of the Irish system have been magnified its benefits
have been forgotten. All Irish history proved that the division of the
land into separate military districts, where the fighting men knew
every foot of ground, and had an intense local patriotism, gave them a
power of defence which made conquest by the foreigner impossible; he
had first to exterminate the entire people. The same division into
administrative districts gave also a singular authority to law. In
mediaeval states, however excellent were the central codes, they were
only put in force just so far as the king had power to compel men to
obey, and that power often fell very far short of the nominal
boundaries of his kingdom. But in Ireland every community and every
individual was interested in maintaining the law of the people, the
protection of the common folk; nor were its landmarks ever submerged
or destroyed. Irish land laws, for example, in spite of the changes
that gradually covered the land with fenced estates, did actually
preserve through all the centuries popular rights--fixity of rates for
the land, fixity of tenure, security of improvement, refusal to allow
great men to seize forests for their chase: under this people's law no
Peasant Revolt ever arose, nor any rising of the poor against their
lords. Rights of inheritance, due solemnities of election, were
accurately preserved. The authority and continuity of Irish law was
recognised by wondering Englishmen--"They observe and keep such laws
and statutes which they make upon hills in their country firm and
stable, without breaking them for any favour or reward," said an
English judge. "The Irish are more fearful to offend the law than the
English or any other nation whatsoever."
The tribal system had another benefit for Irishmen--the diffusion of a
high intelligence among the whole people. A varied education, spread
over many centres, fertilized the general life. Every countryside that
administered its own affairs must of needs possess a society rich in
all the activities that go to make up a full community--chiefs,
doctors, soldiers, judges, historians, poets, artists and craftsmen,
skilled herds, tillers of the ground, raisers and trainers of horses,
innkeepers, huntsmen, merchants, dyers and weavers and tanners. In
some sequestered places in Ireland we can still trace the settlements
made by Irish communities. They built no towns nor needed any in the
modern sense. But entrenchments of earth, or "raths," thickly gathered
together, mark a site where men lived in close association. Roads and
paths great and small were maintained according to law, and boats
carried travellers along rivers and lakes. So frequent were the
journeys of scholars, traders, messengers from tribe to tribe, men
gathering to public assemblies, craftsmen, dealers in hides and wool,
poets, men and women making their circuit, that there was made in
early time a "road-book" or itinerary, perhaps some early form of map,
of Ireland.
This life of opportunity in thickly congregated country societies gave
to Ireland its wide culture, and the incredible number of scholars and
artificers that it poured out over Europe with generous ardour. The
multitudinous centres of discussion scattered over the island, and the
rapid intercourse of all these centres one with another, explain how
learning broadened, and how Christianity spread over the land like a
flood. It was to these country settlements that the Irish owed the
richness of their civilisation, the generosity of their learning, and
the passion of their patriotism.
Ireland was a land then as now of intense contrasts, where equilibrium
was maintained by opposites, not by a perpetual tending towards the
middle course. In things political and social the Irish showed a
conservatism that no intercourse could shake, side by side with eager
readiness and great success in grasping the latest progress in arts or
commerce. In their literature strikingly modern thoughts jostle
against the most primitive crudeness; "Vested interests are shameless"
was one of their old observations. In Ireland the old survived beside
the new, and as the new came by free assimilation old and new did not
conflict. The balance of opposites gave colour and force to their
civilisation, and Ireland until the thirteenth century and very
largely until the seventeenth century, escaped or survived the
successive steam rollings that reduced Europe to nearly one common
level.
In the Irish system we may see the shaping of a true democracy--a
society in which ever-broadening masses of the people are made
intelligent sharers in the national life, and conscious guardians of
its tradition. Their history is throughout a record of the nobility of
that experiment. It would be a mechanical theory of human life which
denied to the people of Ireland the praise of a true patriotism or the
essential spirit of a nation.