But on the fourth day, Dermot watched his foe narrowly, and when the
dusk came on, and he saw that he was about to spring into the well, he
flung his arms tightly about him, and the wizard champion struggled to
get free, but Dermot held him, and at length they both fell together
into the well, deeper and deeper to the very bottom of the earth, and
there was nothing to be seen but dim shadows, and nothing to be heard
but vague confused sounds like the roaring of waves. At length there
came a glimmering of light, and all at once bright day broke suddenly
around them, and they came out at the other side of the earth, and found
themselves in Tir-fa-ton, the land under the sea, where the flowers
bloom all the year round, and no man has ever so much as heard the
word Death.
What happened there; how Dermot O'Dynor met the other heroes, and how
the fourteen Fenni who had been carried off were at last recaptured,
would be too long to tell. Unlike most of these legends all comes right
in the end; Gilla Dacker and his ugly horse disappear suddenly into
space, and neither Finn himself nor any of his warriors ever see
them again.
It is impossible, I think, to read this, and to an even greater degree
some of the other stories, which have been translated by Mr. Joyce and
others, without perceiving how thoroughly impregnated with old-world and
mythological sentiment they are. An air of all but fabulous antiquity
pervades them, greater perhaps than pervades the legends of any other
north European people. We seem transplanted to a world of the most
primitive type conceivable; a world of myth and of fable, of direct
Nature interpretations, of mythology, in short, pure and simple. Even
those stories which are known to be of later origin exhibit to a greater
or less degree the same character; one which has come down to them
doubtless from earlier half-forgotten tales, of which they are merely
the final and most modern outcome.
When, too, we turn from the legends themselves to the legend-makers,
everything that we know of the position of the bards _(Ollamhs_ or
_Sennachies)_ carries out the same idea. In the earliest times they were
not merely the singers and story-tellers of their race, but to a great
degree they bore a religious or semi-religious character. Like the
Brehons or judges they were the directors and guides of the others, but
they possessed in addition a peculiarly Druidical character of sanctity,
as the inheritors and interpreters of a revelation confided to them
alone. A power the more formidable because no one, probably, had ever
ventured to define its exact character.
The Head bard or Ollamh, in the estimation of his tribesmen, stood next
in importance to the chieftain or king--higher, indeed, in some
respects; for whereas to slay a king might, or might not be criminal, to
slay an Ollamh entailed both outlawing in this life and a vaguer, but
not the less terrible, supernatural penalty in another. Occasionally, as
in the case of the Ollamh Fodla, by whom the halls of Tara are reputed
to have been built, the king was himself the bard, and so combined both
offices, but this appears to have been rare. Even as late as the
sixteenth century, refusal of praise from a bard was held to confer a
far deeper and more abiding stigma upon a man than blame from any other
lips. If they, "the bards," says an Elizabethan writer, "say ought in
dispraise, the gentleman, especially the meere Irish, stand in
great awe."
It is easy, I think, to see this is merely the survival of some far more
potent power wielded in earlier times. In pre-Christian days especially,
the penalty attaching to the curse of a Bard was understood to carry
with it a sort of natural anathema, not unlike the priestly anathema of
later times. Indeed there was one singular, and, as far as I am aware,
unique power possessed by the Irish Bards, which goes beyond any
priestly or papal anathema, and which was known as the _Clann Dichin_, a
truly awful malediction, by means of which the Ollamh, if offended or
injured, could pronounce a spell against the very land of his injurer;
which spell once pronounced that land would produce no crop of any kind,
neither could living creature graze upon it, neither was it possible
even to walk over it without peril, and so it continued until the wrong,
whatever it was, had been repented, and the curse of the Ollamh was
lifted off from the land again.
Is it to be wondered at that men, endowed with such powers of blessing
or banning, possessed of such mystic communion with the then utterly
unknown powers of nature, should have exercised an all but unlimited
influence over the minds of their countrymen, especially at a time when
the powers of evil were still supposed to stalk the earth in all their
native malignity, and no light of any revelation had broken through the
thick dim roof overhead?
Few races of which the world has ever heard are as imaginative as that
of the Celt, and at this time the imagination of every Celt must have
been largely exercised in the direction of the malevolent and the
terrible. Even now, after fourteen hundred years of Christianity, the
Connaught or Kerry peasant still hears the shriek of his early gods in
the sob of the waves or the howling of the autumn storms. Fish demons
gleam out of the sides of the mountains, and the black bog-holes are the
haunts of slimy monsters of inconceivable horror. Even the less directly
baneful spirits such as Finvarragh, king of the fairies, who haunts the
stony slopes of Knockmaa, and all the endless variety of _dii minores_,
the cluricans, banshees, fetches who peopled the primitive forests, and
still hop and mow about their ruined homes, were far more likely to
injure than to benefit unless approached in exactly the right manner,
and with the properly littered conjurations. The Unknown is always the
Terrible; and the more vivid an untaught imagination is, the more
certain it is to conjure up exactly the things which alarm it most, and
which it least likes to have to believe in.
III
PRE-CHRISTIAN IRELAND.
Getting out of this earliest and foggiest period, whose only memorials
are the stones which still cumber the ground, or those subtler traces of
occupation of which philology keeps the key, and pushing aside a long
and uncounted crowd of kings, with names as uncertain as their deeds,
pushing aside, too, the legends and coming to hard fact, we must picture
Ireland still covered for the most part with pathless forests, but here
and there cleared and settled after a rude fashion by rough
cattle-owning tribes, who herded their own cattle and "lifted" their
neighbour's quite in the approved fashion of the Scotch Highlanders up
to a century and a half ago.
Upon the whole, we may fairly conclude that matters were ameliorating
more or less; that the wolves were being killed, the woods cleared--not
as yet in the ferocious wholesale fashion of later days--that a little
rudimentary agriculture showed perhaps here and there in sheltered
places. Sheep and goats grazed then as now over the hills, and herds of
cattle began to cover the Lowlands. The men, too, were possibly
beginning to grow a trifle less like two-legged beasts of prey, though
still rough as the very wolves they hunted; bare-legged, wild-eyed
hunter-herdsmen with--who can doubt it?--flocks of children trooping
vociferously at their heels.
Of the daily life, habits, dress, religion of these people--the direct
ancestors of four-fifths of the present inhabitants of Ireland--we know
unfortunately exceedingly little. It is not even certain, whether human
sacrifices did or did not form--as they certainly did in Celtic
Britain--part of that religion, though there is some evidence that it
did, in which case prisoners taken in battle, or slaves, were probably
the victims.
That a considerable amount of slavery existed in early Celtic Ireland is
certain, though as to the rules by which it was regulated, as of almost
every other detail of the life, we know little or nothing. At the time
of the Anglo-Norman conquest Ireland was said to be full of English
slaves carried off in raids along the coast, and these filibustering
expeditions undoubtedly began in very early times. St. Patrick himself
was thus carried off, and the annalists tell us that in the third
century Cormac Mac Art ravaged the whole western coast of Britain, and
brought away "great stores of slaves and treasures." To how late a
period, too, the earlier conquered races of Ireland, such as the
Formorians, continued as a distinct race from their Milesian conquerors,
and whether they existed as a slave class, or, as seems more probable,
as mere outcasts and vagabonds out of the pale of humanity, liable like
the "Tory" of many centuries later, to be killed whenever caught; all
these are matters on which we have unfortunately only the vaguest hints
to guide us.
The whole texture of society must have been loose and irregular to a
degree that it is difficult for us now to conceive, without central
organization or social cement of any kind. In one respect--that of the
treatment of his women--the Irish Celt seems to have always stood in
favourable contrast to most of the other rude races which then covered
the north of Europe, but as regards the rest there was probably little
difference. Fighting was the one aim of life. Not to have washed his
spear in an adversary's gore, was a reproach which would have been felt
by a full-grown tribesman to have carried with it the deepest and most
lasting ignominy. The very women were not in early times exempt from war
service, nay, probably would have scorned to be so. They fought beside
their husbands, and slew or got slain with as reckless a courage as the
men, and it was not until the time of St. Columba, late in the sixth
century, that a law was passed ordering them to remain in their homes--a
fact which alone speaks volumes both for the vigour and the undying
pugnacity of the race.
While, on the one hand, we can hardly thus exaggerate the rudeness of
this life, we must be careful, on the other, of concluding that these
people were simple barbarians, incapable of discriminating right from
wrong. Men, even the wildest, rarely indeed live entirely without some
law to guide them, and certainly it was so in Ireland. A rule was
growing up and becoming theoretically at any rate, established, many of
the provisions of which startle us by the curious modernness of their
tone, so oddly do they contrast with what we know of the condition of
civilization or non-civilization then existing.
Although this ancient Irish law was not drawn up until long after the
introduction of Christianity, it seems best to speak of it here, as,
though modified by the stricter Christian rule, it in the main depended
for such authority as it possessed upon traditions existing long before;
traditions regarded indeed by Celtic scholars as tracing their origin
beyond the arrival of the first Celt in Ireland, outcomes and survivals,
that is to say, of yet earlier Aryan rule, showing points of resemblance
with the equally Aryan laws of India, a matter of great interest,
carrying our thoughts back along the history of humanity to a time when
those differences which seem now the most inherent and vital were as yet
undreamt of, and not one of the great nations of the modern world were
as much as born.
The two chief books in which this law is contained, the "Book of Aicill"
and the "Senchus-Mor," have only comparatively recently been translated
and made available for English readers. The law as there laid down was
drawn up and administered by the Brehons, who were the judges and the
law-makers of the people, and whose decision was appealed to in all
matters of dispute. The most serious flaw of the system--a very serious
one it will be seen--was that, owing to the scattered and tribal
existence prevailing, there was no strong central rule _behind_ the
Brehon, as there is behind the modern judge, ready and able to enforce
his decrees. At bottom, force, it must not be forgotten, is the sanction
of all law, and there was no available force of any kind then, nor for
many a long day afterwards, in Ireland.
It was, no doubt, owing chiefly to this defective weakness that a system
of fines rather than punishments grew up, one which in later times
caused much scandal to English legal writers. In such a society crime in
fact was hardly recognizable except in the form of an injury inflicted
upon some person or persons. An offence against the State there could
not be, simply because there was no State to be offended. Everything,
from murder down to the smallest and most accidental injury, was
compensated for by "erics" or fines. The amount of these fines was
decided upon by the Brehon, who kept an extraordinary number of
imaginary rulings, descending into the most minute particulars, such as
what fine was to be paid in the case of one person's cat stealing milk
from another person's house, what fine in the case of one woman's bees
stinging another woman, a careful distinction being preserved in this
case between the case in which the sting did or did not draw blood! Even
in the matter of fines it does not seem clear how the penalty was to be
enforced where the person on whom it was inflicted refused to submit and
where there was no one at hand to coerce him successfully.
As regards ownership of land early Irish law is very peculiar, and
requires to be carefully studied. Primogeniture, regarded by all English
lawyers trained under the feudal system as the very basis of
inheritance, was simply unknown. Even in the case of the chieftain his
rights belonged only to himself, and before his death a re-election took
place, when some other of the same blood, not necessarily his eldest
son, or even his son at all, but a brother, first cousin, uncle, or
whoever stood highest in the estimation of the clan, was nominated as
"Tanist" or successor, and received promises of support from the rest.
Elizabethan writers mention a stone which was placed upon a hill or
mound having the shape of a foot cut on it, supposed to be that of the
first chief or ancestor of the race, "upon which stone the Tanist
placing his foot, took oath to maintain all ancient customs inviolably,
and to give up the succession peaceably to his Tanist in due time."
The object of securing a Tanist during the lifetime of the chief was to
hinder its falling to a minor, or some one unfit to take up the
chieftainship, and this continued to prevail for centuries after the
Anglo-Norman invasion, and was even adopted by many owners of English
descent who had become "meere Irish," as the phrase ran, or
"degenerate English."
"The childe being oftentimes left in nonage," says Campion, "could never
defend his patrimony, but by the time he grow to a competent age and
have buried an uncle or two, he also taketh his turn," a custom which,
as he adds, "breedeth among them continual warres."
The entire land belonged to the clan, and was held theoretically in
common, and a redistribution made on the death of each owner, though it
seems doubtful whether so very inconvenient an arrangement could
practically have been adhered to. All sons, illegitimate as well as
legitimate, shared and shared alike, holding the property between them
in undivided ownership. It was less the actual land than the amount of
grazing it afforded which constituted its value. Even to this day a man,
especially in the West of Ireland, will tell you that he has "the grass
of three cows," or "the grass of six cows," as the case may be.
It is curious that the most distinct ancient rules concerning the
excessive extortion of rent are, as has been shown by Sir Henry Maine,
to be found in the "Senchus Mor." Under its regulations three rents are
enumerated--namely, the _rack rent_ to be extorted from one of a strange
tribe; the _fair_ rent from one of the same tribe; and the _stipulated_
rent to be paid equally to either. The Irish clan or sept was a very
loose, and in many cases irregular, structure, embracing even those who
were practically undistinguishable from slaves, yet from none of these
could any but _fair_ or customary rent be demanded. It was only when
those who by no fiction could be supposed to belong to the clan sought
for land that the best price attainable might be extorted and
insisted upon.
In so primitive a state of society such persons were almost sure to be
outcasts, thrown upon the world either by the breaking up of other clans
or by their own misdoings. A man of this class was generally what was
known as a "Fuidhar" or "broken man," and answered in some respects to
the slave or the serf of the early English village community. Like him
he seems to have been his lord's or chief's chattel, and if killed or
injured the fine or "eric" was paid not to his own family, but to his
master. Such men were usually settled by the chief upon the
unappropriated tribal lands over which his own authority tended to
increase. This Fuidhar class from the first seem to have been very
numerous, and depending as they did absolutely upon the chief, there
grew up by degrees that class of armed retainers--kerns and
galloglasses, they were called in later times--who surrounded every
important chief, whether of English or Irish descent, and were by them
quartered forcibly in war time upon others, and so there grew up that
system of "coyne and livery," or forced entertainment for horse and men,
which is to be met with again and again throughout Irish history, and
which undoubtedly was one of the greatest curses of the country, tending
more perhaps than any other single cause to keep its people at the
lowest possible condition of starvation and misery.
No system of representation seems ever to have prevailed in Ireland.
That idea is, in fact, almost purely Teutonic, and seems never to have
sprung up spontaneously amongst any Celtic people. The family was the
real root. Every head of a family ruled his own household, and submitted
in his turn to the rule of his chief. Blood-relationship, including
fosterage, was the only real and binding union; that larger connection
known as the clan or sept, having the smaller one of the family for its
basis, as was the case also amongst the clans of the Scotch highlands.
Theoretically, all members of a clan, high and low alike, were held to
be the descendants of a common ancestor, and in this way to have a real
and direct claim upon one another. If a man was not in some degree akin
to another he was no better than a beast, and might be killed like one
without compunction whenever occasion arose.
Everything thus began and centred around the tribe or sept. The whole
theory of life was purely local. The bare right of existence extended
only a few miles from your own door, to the men who bore the same name
as yourself. Beyond that nothing was sacred; neither age nor sex,
neither life nor goods, not even in later times the churches themselves.
Like his cousin of the Scotch Highlands, the Irish tribesman's life was
one perpetual carnival of fighting, burning, raiding, plundering, and he
who plundered oftenest was the finest hero.
All this must be steadily borne in mind as it enables us to understand,
as nothing else will, that almost insane joy in and lust for fighting,
that marked inability to settle down to orderly life which runs through
all Irish history from the beginning almost to the very end.
Patriotism, too, it must be remembered, is in the first instance only an
idea, and the narrowest of local jealousies may be, and often are, forms
merely of the same impulse. To men living in one of these small isolated
communities, each under the rule of its own petty chieftain, it was
natural and perhaps inevitable that the sense of connection with those
outside their own community should have been remarkably slight, and of
nationality, as we understand the word, quite non-existent. Their own
little circle of hills and valleys, their own forests and pasturage was
their world, the only one practically of which they had any cognizance.
To its scattered inhabitants of that day little Ireland must have seemed
a region of incalculable extent, filled with enemies to kill or to be
killed by; a region in which a man might wander from sunrise to sunset
yet never reach the end, nay, for days together without coming to a
second sea. As Greece to a Greek of one of its smaller states it seemed
vast simply because he had never in his own person explored its limits.
[Illustration: MOUTH OF SEPULCHRAL CHAMBER AT DOWTH, NEW GRANGE.]
IV.
ST. PATRICK THE MISSIONARY.
But a new element was about to appear upon the troubled stage, and a new
figure, one whose doings, however liberally we may discount the more
purely supernatural part of them, strikes us even now as little short of
miraculous. There are plenty of heathen countries still; plenty of
missionaries too; but a missionary at whose word an entire island--a
heathen country given up, it must be remembered, to exceedingly heathen
practices--resigns its own creed, and that missionary, too, no king, no
warrior, but a mere unarmed stranger, without power to enforce one of
the decrees he proclaimed so authoritatively, is a phenomenon which we
should find some little difficulty now, or, indeed, at any time, in
paralleling.
In one respect St. Patrick was less fortunate than his equally
illustrious successor, Columba, since he found no contemporary, or
nearly contemporary chronicler, to write his story; the consequence
being that it has become so overgrown with pious myths, so tangled and
matted with portents and miracles, that it is often difficult for us to
see any real substance or outline below them at all.
What little direct knowledge we have is derived from a famous Irish
manuscript known as "The Book of Armagh," which contains, amongst other
things, a Confession and an Epistle, believed by some authorities to
have been actually written by St. Patrick himself, which was copied as
it now stands by a monkish scribe early in the eighth century. It also
contains a life of the saint from which the accounts of his later
historians have been chiefly drawn.
According to the account now generally accepted he was born about the
year 390, though as this would make him well over a hundred at the time
of his death, perhaps 400 would be the safest date; was a native, not as
formerly believed of Gaul, but of Dumbarton upon the Clyde, whence he
got carried off to Ireland in a filibustering raid, became the slave of
one Milcho, an inferior chieftain, and herded his master's sheep upon
the Slemish mountains in Antrim.
Seven or eight years later he escaped, got back to Britain, was
ordained, afterwards went to Gaul, and, according to one account, to
Italy. But the thought of the country of his captivity seems to have
remained upon his mind and to have haunted his sleeping and waking
thoughts. The unborn children of the pagan island seemed to stretch our
their hands for help to him. At last the inward impulse grew too strong
to be resisted, and accompanied by a few followers, he set foot first on
the coast of Wicklow where another missionary, Paladius, had before
attempted vainly to land, and being badly received there, took boat
again, and landed finally at the entrance of Strangford Lough.
From this point he made his way on foot to Meath, where the king
Laoghaire was holding a pagan festival, and stopped to keep Easter on
the hill of Slane where he lit a fire. This fire being seen from the
hill of Tara aroused great anger, as no lights were by law allowed to be
shown before the king's beacon was lit. Laoghaire accordingly sent to
know the meaning of this insolence and to have St. Patrick brought
before him. St. Patrick's chronicler, Maccumacthenius (one could wish
that he had been contented with a shorter name!), tells that as the
saint drew nigh to Tara, many prodigies took place. The earth shook,
darkness fell, and certain of the magicians who opposed him were seized
and tossed into the air. One prodigy certainly took place, for he seems
to have won converts from the first. A large number appear to have been
gained upon the spot, and before long the greater part of Meath had
accepted the new creed, although its king, Laoghaire himself remained a
sturdy pagan until his death.