THE TRADE ROUTES OF IRELAND.
A DISCUSSION of the Trade Routes of Ireland may seem to some a
superfluous and barren task. It has long been a fashion to look on the
country as an island, “remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow.” Writers
have pictured it as lying through the centuries in primitive barbarism,
an outlying desolation of poverty and disorder. The blame of this
desolation is sometimes laid on the savagery of the people, sometimes
on the position of the island, at the very “ends of the earth.” No
doubt there has been a certain political convenience in the very usual
argument that the geographical position of Ireland, lying so near to
Great Britain, makes it immediately dependent on that country alone, so
that it could by nature have no real converse with Europe, and no door
of civilisation save through England. An island beyond an island--such
is reputed the forlorn position of Ireland. We all naturally believe
that which we constantly hear or frequently repeat: and it is well
from time to time to ask ourselves what reason may lie behind common
tradition--in this special case to enquire what geography and history
may have to tell us of the natural trade routes of Ireland and of
England in former times.
From the map it is plain that the two islands have a very different
outlook. Michelet has pictured Europe with all her main rivers and
harbours opening to the west, and the island of Great Britain alone
lying as a mighty ship poised on the ocean with her prow fronting the
orient. The Thames opens its harbour to the east, the capital looks to
the east, and the early trading centres, the Cinque Ports, turn to the
sunrising. Thus the natural way of trade and travel from England to
the Continent has always been by the narrow seas--across the Channel
or the North Sea to the convenient river-mouths and harbours of the
north European plain. Ireland was in a different case. If the opposite
British coast, for the most part inhospitable mountain and forest,
offered to her in early times a slender trade and a harsh welcome, she
on her side did not turn to it her best natural ports. Those on the
east coast from Waterford to Belfast are few; Dublin, left to itself,
is a poor harbour; and from thence to Belfast there is only one small
port, Ardglass, where the entrance is safe at low tide. The chief
harbours of Ireland in fact were those that swelled with the waves of
the Atlantic Ocean. Her outlook was across its stormy waters, and her
earliest traffic through the perils of the Gaulish sea. The English
were concerned with the north and east of Europe, the Irish with the
south and west, and their paths did not cross.
For Ireland, therefore, the road to Europe did not lie across Great
Britain. As far back as we can see into the primitive darkness the
inhabitants of the island were all in turn out on the great seas. An
old myth or legend tells of the ancient Manannan Mac Lir, “Son of the
Sea,” who was the best pilot that was in the west of Europe, and the
greatest reader of the sky and weather: or who in another tale appears
a sea-god triumphant over the ocean as his boat raced under him on the
immensity of the waters like a chariot on the summer fields, while
he sang in his joy--“That is to me a happy plain with a profusion of
flowers, looking from the chariot of two wheels.” Ireland, in times
beyond the reach of history, lay on the high-road of an ancient trade
between the countries we know as Scandinavia and Gaul. Even in the
Stone age its people cut some of their flint arrows after the fashion
of Portugal, or carried them from that peninsula across the Bay of
Biscay; and fragments of stone cups have been found in Ireland, as in
Britain, which are said to have come from the Mediterranean by the
Gaulish sea. As for the northern traffic, we have traces of it more
than a thousand years before the Christian era in burial mounds of the
Bronze age, where there are stones carved with a form of ornament which
in western Europe is only found in Scandinavia and Ireland.
It was during the Bronze age that the first Gaelic or Goidelic invaders
entered Ireland, coming not through Britain but over-sea from Spain
and Gaul, from the openings of the Garonne and the Loire, or from the
ports of Brittany. And by that open highway sailed also later settlers
from southern and northern Gaul. Some relics of these conquering
tribes, fine rivetted trumpets of bronze made after the fashion of the
continent, of the same pattern as those used in central France about
the Loire, show that they kept up intercourse with their people abroad.
For centuries, in fact, this intercourse can be traced. An invasion
of the Gauls in the third century B.C. left to Leinster its old name
of Laigen, from the broad-headed lances which they carried; and five
hundred years later, in the second century A.D., Irish princes used to
send to Gaul for soldiers to serve in their wars.
In the time of the Roman Empire therefore Irish trade with Europe was
already well established. Tacitus (A.D. 98) tells that its ports and
harbours were well known to merchants; and in the second century the
geographer Ptolemy of Alexandria gave a list, very surprising for the
time, of the river-mouths, mountains, and port towns of Ireland, and
its sea-coast tribes--a knowledge he may have gained from Marinus
of Tyre, or the Syrian traders who conducted the traffic from Asia
Minor to the Rhone, and thence across the Gaulish Sea. Italy exported
her wine in the second century B.C.; and in the second century A.D.,
four hundred years later, when wine was grown on the hill sides of
Provence it may have reached Irish ports, transported by merchants
of Marseilles to the Garonne, or by the valleys of the Rhone and the
Loire, and thence across the sea. They travelled in ships built to
confront Atlantic gales, with high poops standing out of the water
like castles, and great leathern sails--stout hulls that were steered
and worked by the born sailors of the Breton coast. From Brittany the
passage to Ireland could be made in three days. From the Loire it was
two days longer, as we may see from a later Irish story of the sixth
century which tells how a ship-load of strangers, five decades of them,
came sailing from the lands of Latium on pilgrimage to Ireland. Each
decade of pilgrims took with them an Irish saint to guide and protect
the vessel, every one in his turn for a day and a night, which gives a
voyage of five days and nights. As they neared the Irish coast a fierce
storm arose, and St. Senan, who was that day guardian of the company,
rose from dinner with a thigh-bone in his hand, and blessing the air
with the bone brought the pilgrims safe into Cork harbour. The saint
was a practical sailor and pilot, and he had been allotted the best
joint, the portion which by Irish law was given to the king or the high
poet.
But while traders of the Empire sailed to Ireland, the armies of Rome
never crossed the Irish Sea. Ireland therefore lay outside the Roman
Empire, while it lay within the circle of imperial civilisation and
commerce. Christianity first came from across the Gaulish Sea, and
the art of writing, and new forms of ornament. From Gaul the Irish
learned to divide tribe-land into private property marked by boundary
stones. Roman-Hellenistic learning, which spread from northern Italy
to Marseilles, crossed the Irish seas with the merchants of Aquitaine
carrying the wine of Bordeaux; or it was brought home by Irish scholars
of the fourth century who went to seek learning in Narbonne, where
Greek was spoken as a living tongue. The Irish Pelagius, who went to
Italy in 400, was able to carry on a discussion in Jerusalem in 415
with Orosius the Spaniard, in which he spoke Greek while Orosius needed
an interpreter: if he had not learned Greek in Ireland, Zimmer reminds
us, he would not have been able to learn it in Rome. Nearly two hundred
years later, in 595, the Irish saint Columbanus and his companions knew
Greek, but Gregory the Great did not know it, though he had twice been
Papal nuncio in Constantinople. Ovid and Vergil were known and read in
Ireland, where scholars seem to have taken all that Rome had to give of
classical culture and philosophy.
It is often assumed that to share in the benefits of an empire it is
necessary to be a subject country, lying within its police control, and
that the Irish suffered by never having been forced under the authority
of Rome. Perhaps, however, we might learn here another lesson--that
in matters of civilisation what is really needed is not subjection
to force, but free human converse and the willing intercourse of
men. We have the spectacle of an island beyond the military rule,
the police control, the law, of the Roman empire, willingly adopting
all the spiritual good which Rome could give it, and the culture
that the intelligence of its people found to suit them. Free to keep
her own customs, Ireland could gain this new learning without losing
her own civilization and her pride of language, history, and law. It
was in seas of blood that such national pride was wiped out by Roman
conquerors from the plains of Gaul. But for the Irish at that time
there was no violent breach with the traditions of their race, nor any
humiliation or bondage to darken their high spirit; and in the joyful
and brilliant activity of the succeeding centuries they illustrated the
free and peaceful union of two civilizations.
Ireland had another advantage from her place of freedom on the open
highways of the sea. For lying outside the Empire she was saved from
the economic ruin that fell on all the Roman dominions when, by the
fatal policy of the Empire, enterprise and wealth were sucked to the
centre and capital, draining the provinces bare; so that, for example,
witnesses of that time describe the once wealthy port of Cadiz as a
town of great empty warehouses, silent and deserted, save for a few
poor old men and women creeping about its melancholy streets. Her
position saved her too when the barbarians swept over the Empire. As
she had been unconquered by the Romans so she remained unconquered by
Teuton or English. Her learning did not perish before invaders; and if
on the mainland every old line of communication was closed or broken,
her way of the ocean was still free. It is true that the wars of the
English invaders of Britain for some hundred and fifty years (449-597)
barred all passage through it to the Continent. But that route had
never been of any real consequence. A way to Europe across Britain was
no doubt known to the Irish in Roman times, and some pilgrims journeyed
by that way across the Empire. But this was not the main route for
travellers from Ireland, and it was never the line of their continental
trade. There seems to have been little communication on the whole with
Britain. Settlers went over from Ireland to Scotland, to Wales, to the
Cornish peninsula, and founded Irish colonies. But in the main the
Irish troubled themselves very little about Britain at all. In fact
from the third century onwards they were accustomed to give to all
strangers the name of “Galls,” from Gallos, the people of Gaul, the
chief visitors they knew.
To the Irish the important thing therefore was that the way of the
sea was still open. Traders from Gaul sailed along the western coast,
and up the Shannon to Roscommon and Loch Cé, and on the eastern side
their ships passed by the Irish Sea to what is now Down and Antrim, to
Iona, and Cantyre. They still as of old carried the wine of Provence in
great wooden tuns, in one of which three men could stand upright; there
still came men speaking Greek, and scholars of the east, and artists of
Gaul. At this time indeed the Irish were no recluse people, living in a
backwater or severed from the great world. An Old Irish poem tells of
the traditions of Leinster under its ancient kings--“The sweet strain
heard there at every hour; its wine-barque upon the purple flood; its
shower of silver of great splendour; its torques of gold from the
lands of the Gaul.” The metropolis of Columcille’s church organization
at Iona, the established centre of Irish learning at Bangor in Down,
both alike lay in the track of the sailing ships, and in frequent
communication with Europe. News of the destruction by earthquake of
Citta Nuova in Istria was brought to Columcille that same year by
Gaulish mariners. Columbanus and his companions could take ship from
Bangor to Nantes on their mission to Europe (589). Northwards Irishmen
sailed to the Hebrides, the Orkneys, the Shetlands. They seem to have
traded and married with Scandinavians a century before the invasion
of Ireland by the Wikings. Moreover Irishmen had travelled as far as
Iceland in 795, where Nadoddr the Norseman heard of them some sixty
years later.
Thus the old civilization, rudely interrupted elsewhere, was carried
on unbroken in Ireland. Now was the time (500-1000) when the island
began to give back to Europe the treasures of learning which she had
stored up in the time of the Roman Empire, and had kept safely through
the barbarian wars. Missionaries and scholars from Iona and Ireland
carried letters and Christian teaching to every part of England,
while ship-loads of Englishmen went to Ireland for instruction. Other
Irishmen sailed to Brittany, and journeyed east over northern France
beyond the Rhine. A greater number travelled by Nantes, Angers, Tours,
past the monastery of Columbanus at Lisieux, and thence over middle
Europe, or by St. Gall southward through Italy as far as Tarentum,
and to the Holy Land. Occasionally pilgrims and missionaries took
the road to Europe through Britain, when with the settlement of the
English kingdoms and the coming of Augustine (597) a new intercourse
had opened between the English and the continental peoples. That is,
some few travellers went this way, but merchants still kept to the old
sea route, and the greater number of Irish pilgrims and scholars. It
was by that way, for example, according to the old story by a monk of
St. Gall, that two Scots from Ireland sailed to Gaul in the early days
of Charles the Great, and in the market-place, where the merchants
trafficked with the crowds, raised their cry of an Irish trade:--“If
anyone is desirous of wisdom, let him come to us and receive it, for
we have it to sell.” At last they were brought to Charles himself, who
asked what payment they would need; nothing more, they answered, than
convenient situations, ingenious minds, and as living in a foreign
country to be supplied with food and raiment; and the king formed a
school for one of them in France, and set the other at the head of
the great school at Pavia. Irish monasteries, one after another in
rapid order, rose along the main highways of travel, among the ruined
heaps of Roman towns where wild beasts alone found shelter, in forest
and desert and mountain. Every school had Irish teachers and Irish
manuscripts, relics of which still remain in continental libraries.
Ireland became the source of culture to all Germanic nations: indeed
wherever in the seventh and following centuries education or knowledge
is found it may be traced directly or indirectly to Irish influence.
It has been justly said that at the time of Charles the Bald every one
who spoke Greek on the Continent was almost certainly an Irishman,
or taught by an Irishman. By degrees Irish monasteries, built and
supported by Irish money, spread over Europe from Holland to Tarentum,
from Gaul to Bulgaria.
The Continent was therefore well known to Ireland when about 800 A.D. a
new revolution passed over Europe.
Continental trade, as we have seen, had perished with the Roman Empire.
Commerce had fallen to its lowest point. There was scarcely any money,
nor in any country, neither England, nor France, nor Germany, a native
class of merchants; wandering Jews and Greeks and Syrians, and later
Italians, carried on what little buying and selling still survived. On
the shores of the North Sea, however, the Frisians had made their town
of Duurstede, near the mouth of the Rhine, a centre for traffic carried
down the river; and in their stout, flat-bottomed, high-boarded sailing
ships traded across the North Sea and the Baltic. Duurstede became for
a time the chief port of western Europe. There Charles the Great coined
money, and the lines along which the Frisian traders carried their
wares may still be traced by the finding of the Duurstede coins. But
even in the time of the Emperor Charles came the change which was to
sweep away the Frisian traders. This was the rise of the new lords of
the sea--the Scandinavians--who were to wrest commerce from Frisians
and Gauls, and open a new trade for northern Europe.
The Scandinavians got their training in a hard school. They had a
thousand miles of stormy shores to practice seamanship, fishing along
their mountain coasts, and sailing against Arctic tempests round the
North Cape. They had to build better ships than anyone else, and to
sail them better. They invented a new kind of vessel where both oars
and sails were used. And in a short time the Frisians were outdone both
in seamanship and in trade.
East and west the Scandinavians sailed. As early as the eight century
colonies of Swedes were passing by the Baltic and the gulf of
Finland to settle on the opposite coast about Novgorod and along the
Dnieper--the East way, as they called it. They left Scandinavian names
along the rapids of the river as their travellers pushed forward,
till in 839 they came in contact with the Greeks, and Swedes who had
journeyed by the Dnieper were introduced by the Emperor of the East
to the Western Emperor Louis the Pious. Their ships were soon the
terror of the Black Sea shores--laden with warriors tall like palm
trees, ruddy, fairhaired, who were in turn traders and plunderers,
conquerors and slave-dealers. In 865 two hundred of their vessels
appeared before Constantinople; in 880 they had reached the Sea of
Azof, the Don and the Volga; in 913 they had five hundred ships, each
carrying a hundred men, in the Caspian. Novgorod was the mart of their
vast eastern commerce. There have been found in Sweden nearly twenty
thousand Arabian coins, dating from 698 to 1002 A.D., carried across
the Baltic by home-going merchants. Gothland became the general centre
of exchange for the Eastway trade, where Danes sailed from their
settlements on the Mecklenburg coast and the mouth of the Oder, to buy
Russian furs, Greek and Arabian silks, and Indian spices, and here
have been discovered thirteen thousand coins of the tenth and eleventh
centuries--Byzantine, Arabian, and from central Asia.
Other adventurers from Norway and Denmark turned towards the Atlantic
Ocean, trading and plundering in every harbour of the west, as far as
Seville and the Spanish coasts. Northward they peopled Iceland and the
Orkneys, and in time rounded the North Cape. They fished the Ocean for
whales, and opened a trade in whale-meat and in the furs and cod of
the White Sea with Normandy and England. The English liked better to
buy than to catch whales. “Can you take a whale?” we read in an old
West-Saxon dialogue. “Many,” says the home-loving Englishman, “take
whales without danger, and then they get a great price, but I dare not
from the fearfulness of my mind.”
Besides opening out this world-wide trade, the Scandinavians made a
revolution also in the manner of trading. Up to this time buying and
selling had been carried on by travelling dealers, Syrian and Italian.
Now however Norsemen and Danes, who had no towns in their own lands,
planted themselves in their new countries in fortified cities; and, for
example, showed their enterprise by forming in the Five Danish Burghs
in England the earliest federation of towns known outside Italy.
In the new towns a settled class of merchants was established, who
learned to group themselves according to the English system of guilds.
The Scandinavians learned also to strike coins after the manner of
the Frisians. In all these ways, by their new ships, their new trade
routes, their money, their guilds, and their settled merchants in
towns, the Scandinavians won a pre-eminence on the sea, which they were
to hold in their own hands for some two hundred years.
What was the effect in Ireland of this new peril, an attack on Europe
from the sea? In the first place the highways of the sea, never before
closed, were barred by the Scandinavian free-booters. A few Irish
travellers (even from Leinster) did even in 800 and 850 take the old
accustomed journey to the Loire and so across France to Germany;
but the passage was now dangerous. The terrors of the sea journey
drove travellers to the land route, and the way across England to
the Continent became so important that clerics of the tenth century
could not imagine that any other way had ever been possible. The new
sea-kings, moreover, were not the people to forget the ancient and
profitable trade routes of the wine commerce, or the Irish harbours
into which trading ships from north and south had sailed for the
last two thousand years, or the gold that had been dug from Irish
mines in old days. They seized every harbour, sent their boats up
every creek and river, plundered the monasteries and wealthy houses,
broke into every burial mound for treasure, and put a poll-tax on the
men. Scholars and Christian monks fled from the heathen barbarians,
carrying to Europe their treasures and manuscripts. The time of mere
destruction, however, was not long. The Scandinavians were practical
men of affairs, and Norsemen and Danes had settled in Ireland for
business. The “Great Island,” as they called it, was a natural centre
of their new world-wide commerce; lying within the trade circle
formed by the ships that swept from the Orkneys and Hebrides round
the Atlantic coast to the Loire and the Garonne, or that traversed
the Irish Sea from Cantyre to Devonshire and Brittany. It was the
shelter of voyaging ships, the recruiting ground of raiders, the
winter-quarters of fleets; its commerce fell in naturally with the
traffic of the western world. Danes and Irish were presently to the
full as busy in trading as in fighting. Ireland became a commercial
centre, a meeting place of the peoples. There came Grett with the
Greek hat to buy captives for the Iceland market. A host of Saxons
and Britons were brought over by Olaf and Ivar in 871. Almost every
king of Norway sailed his fleet into Irish harbours, to drive off the
rival Danish merchants, to broaden his traffic, to spy out some new
store of gold, to load up with corn, to sweep the cattle down to the
seashore for the “strand-hewing” that was to provision his crews with
meat, fresh and salt, for their ocean course. Traders bargained then
just as they bargain now. There is a harbour of Ardglass on the coast
of County Down where a castle was built many centuries ago to protect
the commerce of the port. The other day an Irishman repaired its
ruins, and for a sign flew from it the flag of one of the Irish lords
of the country, the Red Right Hand of O’Neill. At that very moment a
light schooner sailed into the offing and at once flew in answer the
Danish flag. The vessel was from Marsthal. Getting into port the crew
bargained for herrings, counting out a hundred and ninety-five barrels
of them by “chequers,” while the Ardglass men checked the number on
notched sticks. Neither knew one word of the other’s tongue. So the
Danes did business and sailed away, exactly as their forefathers had
done a thousand years ago.
Between plundering and trading and marriages and alliances Norse and
Irish got to know each other well, as we may see by the story of king
Olaf Tryggwason and his dog. Olaf the Magnificent, most glorious and
far-shining of sea-kings, famed beyond all others for the surpassing
perfection of his warships, being married to Gytha sister of Olaf
Kuaran king of Dublin, abode in England and occasionally in Ireland.
“He happened once,” says the Saga, “to be present in Ireland with
a large naval force engaged in war. A foray to get stores being
necessary, the men went on land and drove towards the shore a multitude
of sheep and cattle; and there followed them a yeoman, who begged Olaf
to give him back his cows from among the flock that they were driving
off. King Olaf answered: ‘Take your cows if you know them, and are
able to separate them from the rest without delaying our journey; but,
I think, neither you nor any other man can do that feat among so many
hundred cattle as are in the drove.’ The yeoman had a big cattle dog
with him. So he sent the dog among the herd as they were driven off
together, and the dog ran up and down among them all, and soon picked
out and put aside as many of the man’s cattle as in the yeoman’s
opinion were there. As these were all marked with one and the same
mark, it was evident that the dog must have had a perfect knowledge of
them. Then the King said: ‘Wonderfully clever is your dog, yeoman; will
you give him to me?’ And the man answered: ‘I will gladly do so.’ Then
the King straightway, in return, gave the yeoman a large gold bracelet,
and promised him his friendship therewith. This dog, the best and most
sensible of all dogs, was named Wigi, and Olaf had him for a long time
afterwards.” There came a day later when Olaf was entrapped by his
enemies in the Baltic, sailing with his fleet on the far-famed Long
Serpent--“never warship has been built in Northern lands its equal for
beauty and size.” “Right and proper is it,” said Earl Eric, “that such
a noble ship should belong to Olaf Tryggwason, for he is truly said to
surpass other kings as much as the Long Serpent surpasses other ships.”
The King, with shield and helmet overlaid with gold, and red silken
kirtle, stood on the ship’s prow, a great dragon’s head ornamented so
that it seemed of gold, and when it gleamed far over the sea as the sun
shone upon it, fear and terror were shot into men’s hearts. “Lay the
big ship more in front. My place in this warlike host is not at the
back of all my men,” he called. “I had the Serpent built of greater
length than other ships that she might stretch the more boldly beyond
them in the battle.” The conflict of heroes raged long. As his enemies
poured over the deck King Olaf, blood falling over his face and arm
from under helmet and mail-sleeve, vanished, no man knew how, in the
waters. The Long Serpent, sinking in the sea, was of no use to its
conquerors. His queen was brought from under the deck weeping bitterly
and so sore wounded with grief that she could neither eat nor drink,
and died in nine days. Throughout the battle the dog Wigi lay without
stirring before the castle of the Short Serpent; it carried him home
along with Einar Thambaskelf, the youth of eighteen, hardest shooter
of his time, who stood by the King in the Long Serpent, who when his
own bow was broken stretched the King’s beyond the arrow head and flung
it away (“Too weak, too weak, the great King’s bow”), who had sprung
after the King into the water, and for his courage was given freedom by
the victors. As they touched land Einar “before going on shore, went
to the dog as he lay there, and said, ‘We’ve no master now, Wigi!’ At
these words the dog sprang up growling, and with a loud yell, as if
seized by anguish of heart, he ran on shore with Einar. There he went
and lay down on the top of a mound, and would take no food from anyone,
though he drove away other dogs, beasts and birds from what was brought
to him. From his eyes, tears coursed one another down his nose, and
thus bewailing the loss of his liege-lord, he lay till he died.” From
that day grief and sorrow lay on Einar. And men remembered the prophecy
of the blind yeoman of Moster that in one voyage Norway should lose
its four most noble things--the king, whose like had never been seen,
the queen, best for sense and goodness that ever came into Norway, the
greatest ship ever built in Norway, and the Irish dog, wiser and more
clever than any other dog in the land.
[Illustration: IRISH TRADE ROUTES]
In Ireland the power of the Scandinavians was shown in the foundation
of two kingdoms, along the two main lines of sea traffic--Dublin on
the eastern sea, and Limerick on the Atlantic. The Norwegian kingdom
on the Liffey had its centre in the mound raised by the river-side
for its Thing or Moot, near where the Dublin Parliament House rose
nine hundred years later. The kingdom stretched over a narrow strip of
shore, the memory of which was preserved for a thousand years, till
a generation ago, in the jurisdiction of the Dublin Corporation over
a long line of coast from the river Delvin below Drogheda to Arklow.
Four fiords--Strangford and Carlingford to the north, and Wexford and
Waterford to the south--lay outside the actual kingdom of Dublin, but
were closely connected with it. Waterford kings were at times of the
same family as the Dublin kings, and in the ninth and tenth centuries
Waterford was sometimes independent and sometimes united to Dublin.
Dublin commanded a double line of commerce--from Scandinavia to Gaul,
and by York to Novgorod and the Eastway. The kingdom was in close
connection with the Danish kingdom of Northumbria, with its capital at
York. For Danish Northumbria, opening on the North Sea by the Humber,
formed the common meeting ground, the link which united the Northmen
of Scandinavia and the Northmen of Ireland. A mighty confederation
grew up. Members of the same house were kings in Dublin, in Man, and
in York. Their descendants were among the chief settlers in Iceland.
The Dublin kings married into the chief houses of Ireland, Scotland,
and the Hebrides. The sea was the common highway which bound the powers
together, and the sea was held by fleets of swift long-ships with from
ninety to a hundred and fifty rowers or fighting men on board. The
Irish Channel swarmed with ships of the Dublin kingdom. It became the
mart of the Scandinavian traders, of Icelandic sailors, and men of
Norway, and merchant princes landing from their cruise to sell their
merchandise or their plunder. “You must this summer make a trading
voyage,” said Earl Hakon to his friend Thori Clack, “as is customary
now with many, and go to Dublin in Ireland.” Far-travelled traders
carried from Dublin and York, deep into the inland of Russia, English
coins and weapons and ornaments such as were used in Great Britain and
Ireland.
“Limerick of the swift ships,” looking out to the Atlantic and the
Gaulish sea, was a rival even to Dublin. The Norwegians first fortified
the town by an earthen or wooden fence, but presently by a wall of
stone, “Limerick of the rivetted stones.” Behind it lay a number of
Norse settlements scattered over Limerick, Kerry, and Tipperary. The
first settlers were from the Hebrides where Irishmen and Norse and
Danes mingled as one people, interchanging names and mingling speech so
that the Norse used Gaelic words for goblets for which they drank their
wine, and the oats for their bread. The name _Maccus_, a later form of
Magnus, was in the tenth century only used by the reigning families
of Limerick, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Man. United by kinship and
by trade, the lords of the Isles and the lords of Limerick constantly
aided one another, and made joint expeditions. Once more the Gaulish
trade was revived, and vessels sailed out from the Shannon to fetch
wine and silks from the harbours of the Loire and the Garonne. From
every bay and river-mouth between Waterford and Lough Foyle streams of
commerce poured into the main current of the Atlantic trade. After a
brief interruption in fact Ireland was once more in the ninth and tenth
century in the full current of European life, and that in a double way.
The lines of merchant vessels carried her trade, while the stream of
her professors and scholars and missionaries brought her fame to every
court in Europe.
King Ælfred has left his record of the three Irishmen who came “in a
boat without oars from Hibernia, whence they had stolen away because
for the love of God they would be on pilgrimage, they recked not where.
The boat in which they fared was wrought of three hides and a half,
and they took with them enough meat for seven nights.” On the seventh
day they drifted ashore at Cornwall, and were taken on to Ælfred whose
captives they had thus become. Perhaps from them that great-hearted and
far-sighted English king learned to honour the Irish. He sent gifts to
monasteries in Ireland. He noted in his Chronicle the death of Suibhne,
anchorite of Clonmacnois, “the most learned teacher among the Scots,”
said Ælfred.
From this story some may have supposed that the “primitive” Irishmen
had not yet got beyond the rude fishing-boats of savage life. But we
have here in fact only an instance of the strange contrasts which make
Irish history so full of wonder, so rich in human interest. In the
midst of a world of furious trade and war, Irish poets and mystics,
obedient to the ancient message of their masters, still went down to
the sea-brink abiding there “the revelation of knowledge.” In the vast
solitude of sea and sky beyond which, in which, waited the revelation,
the seen and the unseen were confounded and limits of space and time
fell away in infinity. The everlasting gates were there, the way of the
soul’s escape from imprisonment in shadows, the opening of the Eternal
Reality. Abandoning will and fear, they cast themselves on Nature and
the God immanent in Nature, and summoned by the silent call went out in
faith, “they recked not where.”
Thus in Ireland old worlds were ever intermixed with new. Pilgrims cast
themselves on the sea in curraghs, and drifted to the Faroes and to
Iceland carrying with them the power of piety and learning. But there
were also Irish traders with business minds. They, like the French,
learned from the Scandinavians to build ships, and like the French,
used Norse words for their new sea-faring vessels, “brown-planked”
warships, and merchant ships, ships large and small, and boats; and
for the planks and sides, bottom-boards, row-benches, taff-rail,
gunwale, the creaking, of the row-bench, the steersman. They learned
too from the Scandinavians their method of raising a navy by dividing
the country into districts, each of which had to equip and man so many
ships which were to assemble at the summons to arms into the united war
fleet--the levy and the fleet both called by Norse words. Sagas of the
Danish time tell of “the fleet of the men of Munster,” of “Munster of
the swift ships,” six or seven score of them ready to sail to Dundalk
or to the Mull of Cantyre at the call of the king of Cashel.
The Irish had also their fleets of merchant ships. An old poem of about
900 A.D. gives a description of the dwellers on the coast from Carn or
Mizen Head to Cork (the Irish clan of the O’Mahoneys chief among them)--
“High in beauty,
Whose resolve is quiet prosperity.”
a description which has been generally considered quite unsuited to the
Irish and more naturally reserved for Englishmen. The merchant princes
won for their province the name of “Munster of the great riches.” But
the signs of foreign trade, chains and massive links of silver, and
brooches of Scandinavia and the eastern world, are found all over
Ireland--Belfast, Navan, Monaghan, Limerick, Galway, Cavan, King’s and
Queen’s Counties--the patterns wholly unlike Irish work. There were
enamelled glass beads, and silks and satins and stores of silver,
oriental goods from the Caspian and East Mediterranean, which had been
carried across Russia to Swedish and Danish lands and so to Ireland.
“What is best for a king?” asked an Irish poet of the tenth century.
“Fish in river-mouths.
Earth fruitful.
Inviting barks into harbour
Importing treasures from over-sea.
Silken raiment.
Abundance of wine and mead.
Let him foster every science.”
Thus it was that the Irish wrested some advantage out of the Danish
wars. They profited by the material skill and knowledge of the
invaders. They were willing to absorb the foreigners, to marry with
them, and even at times to share their wars. They learned from them
to build ships, organise naval forces, advance in trade, and live in
towns; they used Scandinavian words for the parts of a ship and the
streets of a town. The Irish gave proof of a real national vigour. In
outward and material civilization they accepted modern Norse methods,
just as in our days the Japanese accepted modern Western inventions.
But in what the Germans call Culture--in the ordering of society and
law, of life and thought, the Irish like the Japanese never for a
moment abandoned their national loyalty to their own country. During
two centuries of Danish wars they did not loosen hold of their old
civilization. “Concealing ancient lore, to hold any new thing fair,”
they said face to face with the new Scandinavian system, “this is the
way of folly.” They maintained their schools, their art and literature.
They preserved their church. Writers of the ninth century describe the
duty of an Irish king: he had to journey over the land and bring each
chief under law: “let him enslave criminals”: “let him perfect the
proper due of every man of whatever is his on sea or land.” On their
side the tribes were to have for their protection not only “a lawful
lord,” but “a meeting of nobles”; “frequent assemblies”; “an assembly
according to rules”; “a lawful synod.” We read of yet larger Assemblies
for the whole country “to make concord between the men of Ireland.” If
the chief places of the people were captured, they went out into the
bog-lands to elect their kings according to their law. Thus when Cashel
was held by the Danes the seventeen tribes of Munster gathered in a
marshy glen, where the nobles sat in assembly on a mound, and decided
to choose one Cennedig as king. But the queen, Cellachan’s mother,
appeared before them, and in a speech and a lay which she made declared
the right of Cellachan. And when the champions of Munster heard these
great words and the speech of the woman they rose up to make Cellachan
king, “and gave thanks to the true magnificent God for having found him
... and put their hands in his hand, and placed the royal diadem round
his head, and their spirits were raised at the grand sight of him.”
Under the power of this national feeling the Irish learned from the
Danes not only the new trade, but they learned also the new sea
warfare, and understood their lesson so well that they were soon
able to drive back the armies and fleets of the Danes, and to become
themselves the leaders of Danish and Norse troops in war. It was
about 950 A.D. that the Irish won their first famous naval victory.
Cellachan, king of Cashel, had been taken prisoner by the Norse, and
was carried to Sitric’s ship at Dundalk. An army was sent from Munster
across Ireland to rescue him. They demanded to have back their king.
“Give honour to Cellachan in the presence of the men of Munster!”
commanded Sitric in his wrath. “Let him even be bound to the mast! For
he shall not be without pain in honour of them!” “I give you my word,”
said Cellachan, as he was lifted up, “that it is a greater sorrow to me
not to be able to protect Cashel for you, than to be in great torture.”
“It is a place of watching where I am,” he cried, high lifted above
them all. “I see what your champions do not see, since I am at the
mast of the ship.” “Are these your ships that are coming now?” said he.
For on the far horizon rose the masts of his fleet of Munster sailing
into Dundalk harbour, six score of them, the full muster of the ships
gathered from every sea port between Cork and Galway, from the regions
of Bandon and Kinsale, from the land of the O’Driscolls who held the
coast from Bandon across Clear harbour to Crookhaven and the river of
Kenmare, from the Dingle peninsula, from “Kerry of the rushes” on the
Shannon shore, from western Clare, and from Corcomroe and Burren. When
the Irish captains looked on their king bound and fettered to the mast,
their aspect became troubled, their colour changed, and their lips
grew pale. From his place of agony Cellachan watched the onset of his
sailors, and heard the rattle of swords and javelins filling the air,
like the sound that arises from the seashore full of stones trodden by
herds of cattle and racing horses. He saw the Irish fling tough ropes
of hemp over the long prows of the Norse ships to hold them fast,
while the Norsemen threw stout chains of blue iron. He saw his people,
defended only by their “strong enclosures of linen cloth to protect
bodies and necks and noble heads,” as they dashed themselves into
the Norse ships among the mail-clad warriors; he watched the heroic
Failbe springing on the deck of Sitric’s battle-ship, and with a high
and deer-like leap mount on the mast, his right-hand sword swinging
against the crowding enemy, while with the sword in his mighty left
hand he cut the ropes that bound king Cellachan. In the moment of his
king’s salvation Failbe fell dead. As the Norsemen struck off his head
and set it upon the prow of the ship, Failbe’s foster-brother, mad for
revenge, with an eager falcon-like leap sprang into the warship, and
since no weapon of his could pierce the armour of the Norse king, he
fixed his white hands in the bosom of Sitric’s coat of mail and dragged
him down into the water, so that they together reached the gravel and
the sand of the sea and rested there. After six hours’ battle the
remnant of the Scandinavian fleet put out to sea, and, says the old
saga, they carried neither King nor Chieftain with them.
After that battle came other triumphs; the fleet of the kings of Ailech
that carried off plunder and booty from the Hebrides: Brian Boru’s
expedition of the Norsemen of Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, and of the
men of Munster, and of almost all of the men of Erin such of them as
were fit to go to sea, and they levied tribute from Saxons and Britons
as far as the Clyde and Argyle. The spirit of independence rose high,
and victorious warriors established again the rule of the Irish in
their own land.
But the Danes had no mind to let Ireland and her harbours and her sea
routes fall out of their hands. The great conflict of the two peoples
came about sixty years after the victory of Cellachan.
The Danes had now held command of the sea for two hundred years. About
1000 A.D., in the glory of success, their kings, like later monarchs in
Europe, began to think of their “Imperial Destiny.” It seemed time to
perfect the whole business and round off the borders of their State.
So Swein Forkbeard of Denmark proposed to create a Scandinavian Empire
which should extend from the Slavic shores of the Baltic to the rim of
the Atlantic, with the North Sea as a lake of this wide dominion. Swein
overran England, and his son Cnut ruled from the Baltic to the Irish
Channel, lord of Denmark, Norway, England, and the Danes of Dublin
(for he minted coins even there), with London as the chief city of
the new Danish Empire. The imperial plan was not yet complete. Danish
rule was to extend to the outermost land on the Atlantic. But Ireland
blocked the way. The Ireland of King Brian Boru--of men who lived (as
they said) “on the ridge of the world,” men bred in the free air of the
plains and the mountains and the sea--left the Scandinavian Empire with
a ragged edge on the line of the Atlantic commerce. In the spring of
1014 the Danish army gathered in the Bay of Dublin to straighten out
the boundaries of the Empire on the western Ocean. There met a mighty
host under the “Black Raven” of the pagans, woven with heathen spells;
“when the wind blew out the banner it was as though the Raven flapped
his wings for flight.” In that Imperial army there were warriors “from
all the west of Europe,” from Iceland, the Orkneys, the Baltic Islands,
from Norway a thousand men in ringed armour, from Northumbria two
thousand pagans, “not a villain of them who had not polished armour of
iron or brass encasing their bodies from head to foot.” On the night
before the battle Woden himself, the old god of war, rode up through
the dusk men said, on a dapple-grey horse, halbert in hand, to take
counsel with his champions.
But Woden’s last fight was come. The full tide of the morning carried
the pagan host over the level sands to the landing at Clontarf. The
army of King Brian Boru lay before them. From sunrise to sunset on Good
Friday that desperate battle raged, the hair of the warriors flying in
the wind, says the old chronicler, as thick as the sheaves floating
in a field of oats. The Scandinavian scheme of a Northern Empire was
shattered on that day, when with the evening flood-tide the remnant
of the Danish host put out to sea. The work which had been begun by
the fleet of Cellachan in Dundalk harbour sixty-four years before, was
completed by Brian Boru where the Liffey opens into the Bay of Dublin.
For a hundred, and fifty years to come Ireland kept its independence.
England was once again, as in the time of the Roman dominion, made part
of a continental empire. Ireland, as in the days of Rome, still lay
outside the new imperial system.
Clontarf marked the passing of an old age, the beginning of a new. We
may see the advent of the new men in the names of adventurers that
landed with the Danes on that low shore at Clontarf--the first great
drops of the coming storm. There were lords from Normandy, Eoghan Barun
or John the Baron, and Richard, with another, perhaps Robert of Melun.
There was Goistilin Gall, a Frenchman from Gaul. There was somewhere
about that time Walter the Englishman, a leader of mercenaries
from England. In such names we see the heralds of the approaching
change. A revolution in the fortunes of the world had in fact opened.
Scandinavian pre-eminence on the sea was even now passing away, as that
of the Frisians had passed away two hundred years before. New lords of
commerce seized the traffic of sea and land when the Normans, “citizens
of the world,” carried their arms and their cunning from the Moray
Firth to the Straits of Messina, from the Seine to the Euphrates. The
Teutonic peoples that now girded the North Sea--Normans, Germans of
the Hanseatic League, English--were to supersede Danes and Norwegians.
Trade moreover had once more spread over the high roads of Europe, as
in the days of the Roman Empire, and the peoples of the south, Italians
and Gauls, had taken up again their ancient commerce.
In the new commerce as in the old Ireland was to take her full part.
The island lay in the moving life that stirred the great seas, washed
by that whirlpool of activity. From every shore she saw the sails of
busy traffickers bearing the commerce of the known world, and carrying
too its thought and art. The people had not lost their wit. They shared
in the enterprise and the profit of the new commerce. The great routes
were open, from Scandinavia to Gaul, and down the Irish Channel. The
Danish traffic across England was not forgotten, and as the trade of
the German coasts developed, busier lines of commerce were opened from
the Irish harbours of the south eastward to the North Sea and the
Baltic.
It is an unfinished tale I tell. But it may remind us of one gift of
Nature to Ireland--the freedom of Europe by the sea. We have seen the
dim figures of the flint-men, the Bronze-men, the first Gaels, reaching
out hands to Scandinavia and to the Mediterranean lands. We have seen
Ireland on the borders of the Roman Empire, free and unconquered,
busy in trade, busier still in learning, carrying across the Gaulish
Sea treasures of classical knowledge. Again Ireland appeared when the
barbarians had spread over Europe, still unconquered, sending back
across the Ocean the learning she had stored up, the free distributor
on the Continent of the classics and science and Christian teaching. We
have seen the island again on the fringe of the Scandinavian Empire,
even now unconquered, and still in the mid-stream of European traffic.
When a new revolution came, and trade swelled under the Normans, every
Irish port was full. Irishmen sailed every sea. Their fabrics were
sold in every country as far as Russia and Naples. Through the long
centuries they never lost the habit of the sea and of Europe. In the
middle ages Spanish coin was almost the chief currency in Ireland, so
great was the Irish trade with Spain; and in the eighteenth century
the country was still full of Spanish, Portuguese, and French money
in daily use--the moydore, the doubloon, the pistole, the Louis d’or,
the new Portuguese gold coin. So much so that in the Peninsular war
Ireland was ransacked for foreign coins to send to the army in Spain
and Portugal.
But that story is over. Ireland at last was swept within the orbit
of an Empire--not as a free member of a federation, but in full
subjection, with every advantage that complete military and police
control could afford. Natural geography gave place to political
geography, and the way of the Empire ruled out the way of the sea. “I
should not presume,” wrote Richard Cox, Esquire, Recorder of Kinsale,
in dedicating to their Majesties William and Mary a History of Ireland
from the Conquest thereof, which he printed at St. Paul’s Churchyard
in 1689. “I should not presume to lay this treatise at your Royal
feet, but that it concerns a noble Kingdom, which is one of the most
considerable branches of your mighty Empire.
“It is of great Advantage to it, that it is a Subordinate Kingdom of
the Crown of _England_; for it is from that Royal Fountain that the
Streams of Justice, Peace, Civility, Riches and all other Improvements
have been derived to it; so that the Irish are (as Campion says)
beholding to God for being conquered.
“And yet Ireland has been so blind in this Great Point of its true
Interest, that the Natives have managed almost a continual war with
the English ever since the first Conquest thereof; so that it has cost
your Royal Predecessors an unspeakable mass of Blood and Treasure to
preserve it in true Obedience.
“But no cost can be too great where the Prize is of such value; and
whoever considers the Situation, Ports, Plenty, and other Advantages
of Ireland will confess, that it must be retained at what rate soever;
because if it should come into an Enemy’s Hands, England would find it
impossible to _flourish_; and perhaps difficult to _subsist_ without it.
“To demonstrate this assertion, it is enough to say that Ireland lies
in the _Line of Trade_, and that all the English vessels that sail to
the _East_, _West_ and _South_, must, as it were, run the _gauntlet_
between the Harbours of Brest and Baltimore: and I might add that the
Irish Wool, being transported, would soon ruine the English clothing
Manufacture.
“Hence it is that all Your Majesties Predecessors have kept close to
this Fundamental Maxim, of retaining Ireland inseperably united to the
Crown of England.”
The house of Hanover ended what the Tudors had begun. Ireland became an
island beyond an island. But the great deep still gives to the country
an abiding unity. In ancient days the Irish had a noble figure by which
they proclaimed the oneness of the land within its Ocean bounds. The
three waves of Erin they said, smote upon the shore with a foreboding
roar when danger threatened the island. One wave called to Munster at
an inlet of Cork; two of them sounded in Ulster, at the mouth of the
Bann and in the bay of Dundrum. The Ocean bore the same fate to Munster
and to Ulster. And in fact so long as the sea surrounds this island, so
long all its peoples must be linked in a common fortune. The deep that
encompasses Ireland has made this country one, gathering together into
the Irish family all races that have entered within its circuit. By the
might of that encircling Ocean the men of Ireland are bound together in
one inheritance, unchanging amid ceaseless change.