Historical Facts about Ireland

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Ireland's Ice Age

Ireland owes the physcal shape of its landscape almost entirely to the actions of the last Ice Age. The Ice Age left the surface relief much as it now is, except that coastlines have been significantly altered by a subsequent rise of the sea-level caused by the melting of the ice [1].



For reasons not yet fully understood, our planet goes through cycles of warm and cool periods. The last cold spell began around 30,000 years ago and, in Ireland's neighbourhood, caused the Arctic ice to descend from the North Pole towards Europe. By 20,000 years ago Ireland was almost totally covered by a thick ice sheet stretching south-west from Scotland. Throughout this period the build up of ice on land across the world caused the sea level to drop. (See map.) By 20,000 years ago, it had dropped to a level 120 metres (400 feet) below the level it is today. [2] This retreat of the waters meant that Ireland and Britain were once again joined together and joined to continental Europe. On average, 30 to 40km (19 to 25 miles) [3] of sea bed was exposed around the British Isles.

Ireland in the Ice Age [24kB]The photo bellow, shows what Ireland would probably have looked like during the Ice Age. Thick glaciers and ice sheets would have covered all but the highest peaks and icebergs would have calved into the seas around the island. Little or no vegetation or animal life would have inhabited Ireland.

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Over the next 2000 years the expansion of the ice slowed, reached equilibrium and then began to retreat. By 15,000 years ago only Ulster was still buried under the dying ice sheet. Although the rising sea levels had begun to flood the lower lands, a land bridge still connected the south-eastern tip of Ireland to south-western England. Trapped between this land bridge, and the ice sheet in the north, the Irish Sea was filled forming a vast freshwater lake. It was at this time that the first plant life returned to reclaim the rocky wilderness that Britain and Ireland had been reduced to. First rugged grasses coated the land and, around 13,000 years ago, the first trees (hardy Junipers) began to grow. Many animals, including the Giant Deer, crossed into Ireland across the land bridge. [2]

The low-lying lands around Ireland, Britain and Europe were slowly inundated as the sea rose at a maximum rate of around 6mm/year [3]. The land bridge between Ireland and Britian was finally overwhelmed by the sea 12,000 years ago, flooding the fresh water Irish Sea with salt water (however, short-term fluctuations did cause the land bridge to reappear briefly on several more occasions). One of the most spectacular episodes of this time must surely have been the inundation of the vast Dogger Bank, which lies between Britain and Denmark. Today, the Dogger Bank lies 50 metres (165 feet) below the North Sea, but 10,000 years ago it was covered in coniferous forest inhabited by a variety of animals and possibly stone-age humans. In an indundation that is estimated to have lasted only a few decades, 200,000 km2 (78,000 miles2) of forest was flooded by the rising sea. Had there been any Environmentalists around at the time, this would have been a very traumatic period of history for them.

As the ice melted, rivers and lakes formed in the new landforms left by the glaciers. The new river pattern in Ireland had no similarity with what there had been before. Of course, we cannot know what pre-Ice Age Ireland looked like, because the ice destroyed the old landscape so completely. Although all the ice was gone by 10,000 years ago, the sea levels continued to rise reaching a level 2 metres (7 feet) below their current level by 3000 years ago [3]. The weight of the ice (several hundred tonnes per square metre) had pressed the land surface down by several metres. Once gone, the north of the island began to rise again. This process is ongoing: Malin Head, county Donegal, is rising at a rate of 2 to 3mm per year relative to sea level [3].

For all its destruction, the beautiful landscape that the Ice Age left behind played a large part in the the unfolding human history of Ireland. As French geographer Vidal de la Blache commented "man and his environment are more intimate than a snail and his shell". The first humans are thought to have arrived in Ireland 9000 years ago (7000BC). Although, in that time, we have altered Ireland's landscape fundamentally, we have not come close to the same scale of changes that were wrought by the Ice Age.


This map shows Ireland at two stages in the Ice Age. The dark purple line shows the maximum extent of the ice 20,000 years ago. The light purple line shows how far the ice had retreated by 13,000BC (15,000 years ago). The division between the two shades of blue indicates the approximate coastline in 13,000BC. Also shown on the map are the distribution of Drumlins, Eskers and Corries, which are all glacial landforms. These three types of feature are explained in more detail in the physical landscape section of the geography section.

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A note on the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age

The paleolithic hunter-gatherers of Europe hunted the animals of the tundra. As the ice sheet retreated northwards, so did the paleolithic tribes. However, while Britain was still attached to Europe by a land bridge, Ireland had already become an island, largely inaccessible to the hunters. So there is (currently) no evidence to suggest that there ever was a human paleolithic presence in Ireland. Elsewhere in Europe, the mesolithic way of life slowly took over from the paleolithic. During this period, Ireland's vegetation developed, although it never reached the same levels of diversity that Britian (being easier to migrate to) reached. The myriad shallow lakes that were later to become the great raised peat bogs had not yet been filled in, and the land was covered by forests and was the home to many kinds of animals.

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The Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age [1,2

The first humans in Ireland are thought to have crossed from Scotland, in wooden boats, to what is now county Antrim around 8000BC. It is also thought that the rising land and rising sea levels may have moved at a fluctuating pace, occasionally allowing the southern land bridge to re-emerge from the Irish Sea, as well as a northern one connecting Antrim to Scotland. These would have lasted only briefly, but would have allowed the migrations of both humans and animals. There is a cultural continuity between the mesolithic remains found in north Ireland and those in southern Scotland. Ireland was one of the last parts of western Europe to have been settled by humans, and the human presence here is perhaps only about 10,000 years old.

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These early hunters concentrated their activities on waterways, forraging on the shores of the sea, lakes and rivers. They rarely ventured into the forested interior, so Ireland's young ecosystem was almost totally unaffected by these early residents. The earliest concrete evidence of mesolithic activity in Ireland is to be found in county Antrim (which is Ireland's only source of flint), county Londonderry and county Sligo. Mount Sandel (county Londonderry) was excavated in the 1970s. The archaeologists found the remains of mesolithic huts and charcoal from cooking fires, and these have been dated to between 7000BC and 6500BC. 'The Curran' (near Larne in county Antrim) is a raised beach where archaeologists have found thousands of flint tools. In county Offaly, archaeologists uncovered evidence of a Mesolithic settlement at Lough Boora.

Evidence suggests that Ireland was initially populated from Scotland, although there must surely have been some migration from Wales and south-west England. Finds of Mesolithic tools (although not settlements) suggests that these hunters spread south down the east coast of Ireland and inland along rivers to the Shannon basin.

Near the end of the Mesolithic era, which ended roughly around 4000BC, the hunters were beginning to copy coiled pottery using technology that had spread from the more advanced Neolithic tribes of eastern Europe. Although Mesolithic man built huts, pottery and tools, they did not leave any earthworks such as those found in France. The earliest earthworks in Ireland are Neolithic.

The final part of the Mesolithic era is marked by a decline in the population, or at least a decline in the relics that we have found. The climate got wetter at this time and many of the lakes in western Ireland began to turn into the bogs that we know today. This may have caused a decline in the population that the land could support.

Everyday Life in Mesolithic Ireland [3]

A Mesolithic House [11kB]The people of Mesolithic Ireland were hunters and gatherers - farming was not invented until the Neolithic period. The family groups would have lived near rivers and lakes in houses made from animal skins spread over a bowl-shaped timber frame. Some superb reconstructed Mesolithic homes can be seen at the Ulster History Park, near Omagh in county Tyrone. These homes were not permanent - the people moved around a lot from site to site and the skins from the houses were brought with them to the new site. Always the camps were set up near the coast, lakes or rivers and they rarely ventured into the forests of the interior of Ireland. There were not enough people in Ireland for there to be competition for land and there is no evidence of weapons being used against other humans.

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They hunted animals and birds using arrows tipped with sharpened pieces of flint. They also used spears which, although they could not be thrown as far as an arrow, were heavier. Among the animals that these hunters would have sought were deer, duck and wild boar. These food sources would have been most important in the autumn.

They also hunted fish. A man would stand motionless in a river with a flint-barbed harpoon, and spear the unsuspecting salmon and eels as they swam past. This required great patience and skill. The hunter pictured at the top of this page (on exhibit at the Ulster History Park) is on a fishing trip. Some may also have fished further off shore, in lakes or the sea, using skin boats stretched over a wooden frame, or dug-out canoes made from tree trunks. Flounder and bass were favourite catches. Fish formed the biggest part of the Mesolithic diet in the summer, while eels were caught more in the Autumn.

The meat would have been carried back to their campsite where it would have been cooked over an out-door fire and eaten communally. The skins would have been removed to make clothes and to repair or add to the houses.

The women of the community would have also gathered hazelnuts, fruits and berries in the spring, summer and autumn which would have added variety and nutrients to the meat-rich diet. Winter must have been a harsh period, as few food sources were available. It seems that the hunters killed wild boar in the winter.

The key elements of a Mesolithic life were thus flint weapons, a meat-rich diet, a nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle and skin huts.

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The Neolithic, or New Stone Age [1-4]

The key invention that ushered in the Neolithic Age was farming. This invention fundamentally changed the fabric of Mesolithic society because people no longer had to spend all their time hunting, and they were less likely to go hungry when game was hard to find. Additionally, they could built much larger, more permanent dwellings and, perhaps most importantly, this was the first period that people had enough 'spare time' in which to innovate.

It would be a mistake to think that the Mesolithic people of Ireland suddenly invented farming and became Neolithic. Rather, Ireland's Mesolithic hunters were displaced or assimilated by Neolithic settlers who gradually arrived in Ireland from Britain and brought the technology with them. The practice of farming had spread from the Middle East, through eastern and southern Europe to reach Britain around 4000BC. Again it seems that it arrived in Ireland via the Scotland-Antrim link. Evidence from Cashelkeelty, county Kerry, suggests that this happened between 3900BC and 3000BC [4 p28].

The Neolithic settlers set about clearing upland forest (which was thinner and easier to clear than lowland forest) with stone axes, or by burning it, in order to build their permanent farms. As Ireland did not have many native cereal crops, and wild pigs were the only farm animals native to Ireland, the settlers brought with them cows, goats and sheep. It is conjectured that these aninals were transported across the Irish Sea on wooden rafts towed by skin-boats or dugout canoes (hollowed tree trunks). They also brought wheat and barley which they planted in their farms. The newly-cleared upland was used for agriculture, but erosion and overgrazing was soon to cause it to stagnate, acidify and eventually evolve into peat bogs. Thus most of Ireland's upland peat bogs (although not the lower ones) are actually artificial features inadvertently created by Neolithic farmers.

Another piece of new technology introduced to Ireland by the Neolithic settlers was the use of porcellanite. This is a rock that is tougher than the flint used by the Mesolithic Irish. It can be used more effectively for making axes, digging tools etc. They found that they could chop down much larger trees than they could with flint tools, and this allowed them to more effectively clear Ireland's upland forests. Porcellanite was mined almost exclusively in county Antrim, in northern Ireland, and two sites have been excavated by archaeologists: Rathlin Island and Cushendall. Axes from these 'factories' have been found mainly in Ulster, but also across Ireland and as far away as southern England. This suggests that, far from being isolated, the Neolithic Irish farmers were trading with Neolithic Britons.

Neolithic farmers may have lived in larger communities than the Mesolithic Irish did, with a number of families living in a cluster of houses with perhaps a larger multi-purpose building in the centre. Evidence [2] from the "Céide Fields" in county Mayo suggests that these communities may have farmed a considerable amount of land (half a square kilometre in the case of the Céide Fields). The Céide Fields are a series of stone field boundaries discovered preserved under peat on the edge of a cliff in county Mayo. At the time they were made, the climate would have allowed them to grow crops there, although today it is a bog. (Note: Céide is pronounced Kay-je.)

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As the Neolithic farmers were not moving around, they were able to build larger and more permanent dwellings. A Neolithic house was rectangular and made either from tree trunks sunk vertically into the ground or from woven branches covered with mud. The gables at each end were supported by a large beam leaning against the ridge of the roof. The roof itself was made from timber beams with reed thatch covering it. A small hole in the roof allowed smoke to escape because, unlike the Mesolithic Irish, the Neolithic farmers lit their fires and cooked indoors. An excellent reconstruction of a Neolithic house can be seen at the Ulster History Park near Omagh, county Tyrone, and this is pictured above. Note the wattle-and-daub gable wall with the daub (dried mud) removed so that you can see that it is made from finely woven sticks (wattle). Note also the enclosure fence made from a series of vertical logs. We know what these houses looked like because, although most of the wood itself has gone, the post-holes have survived and engineers can thus determine the house's structure.

One final technology that the Neolithic settlers brought to Ireland was pottery. Enough fragments of Neolithic pots have been found in Ireland for it to be reasonably certain how they were made. They were usually made by coiling clay round and round to build up a simple pot shape. These were then smoothed down. Some pots have been decorated by pressing stones, sticks or even fingers into the wet clay. The pot is then hardened by placing it in a hot fire. The pots were used for many things; as well as for storing food, a pot filled with a small amount of fat and set alight was a simple but effective lamp.


Neolithic Megaliths [2,4

One of the most important legacies left by the Neolithic farmers was their megaliths, or large earthen constructions, used primarily as burial places. The emphasis placed on these megaliths in literature is mainly due to the fact that they are the only things to have survived largely intact from the Neolithic era. They can thus give us the best clues to Neolithic life, and while they do perhaps over-emphasise the role of burying the dead in Neolithic society, it was also true that burials seemed to have played an important part in Neolithic society. Not only do the megaliths provide many artefacts such as burial objects, but by digging into their constituent material scientists can learn about the climate and vegetation that existed at the time they were built.

Megaliths are not unique to Ireland - they can be found in a broad sweep of western Europe which includes Spain, Portugal, western France, Denmark, Ireland and parts of Wales and Scotland. Nevertheless, with over 1500 recorded megalithic tombs still in existence in Ireland, it is an important aspect of Irish history. The later peoples of Ireland would wonder at these huge enigmatic constructions and frequently attributed them to giants, giving rise to the proliferation of giants in Irish mythology.

The construction of megaliths did not commence with the first Neolithic settlers. Rather, their construction began several centuries after the first arrivals, around 3500BC. They are heavily concentrated in the north of Ireland and can be broken down into three clear types which may be evidence of primitive religious or political groupings (although that term must be used very loosely).

Court tombs: Are found almost exclusively in the northern half of Ireland: in Ulster and northern Connaught and probably represent the oldest Neolithic constructions. Built mainly in upland areas, a Court tomb basically consisted of a segmented stone chamber covered by an earthen mound, with an entrance courtyard that almost invariably faces east. Today, the earthen mound is usually long eroded away leaving the internal stones of the tomb exposed. While the term 'tomb' is used, it must be said that there is evidence that these structures may possibly have served as temples, rather than simply tombs, and may have been used frequently. Rarely has any intact pottery been found in a court tomb. The best examples of court tombs are Annaghmare, in county Armagh, Magheraghanrush, county Sligo and Tullyskeherny, county Leitrim. There is a large concentration of court tombs in a small area of north county Mayo with other concentrations in counties Sligo, Leitrim, Tyrone and Antrim. The picture is of the court tomb at Deerpark, county Sligo (image ©Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht).

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Portal tomb, or dolmens, are found mainly in the northern half of Ireland, but also in the Wicklow - Wexford - Waterford area and around Galway Bay. Probably originating in the east Tyrone area, they may have developed from court tombs. They consist of three or more vertical stones on top of which is perched one or two huge capstones. The capstones always lean down towards one side, leaving a large opening at the high end. Many have collapsed in the intervening millenia, but they remain one of the most striking forms of megalith. Originally, human remains would have been interred inside the tomb and the entrance sealed with smaller stones, most of which have disappeared in the time since. The best examples are to be found in the Carlingford Lough area of counties Down and Louth. The photograph above shows the portal tomb at Glenroan, county Tyrone.

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Passage Tombs are found in eastern and northern Ireland, although there are a few examples in the south and west. They were built by later Neolithic settlers, probably from western France, and tend to be architecturally more adventurous than court or portal tombs. They consist of a roughly circular earthen mound under which is a central chamber and a passage leading into it. The passage is made from large vertical stones with flat stones laid across them and then covered in soil. In larger examples, the roof of the central chamber tapers in a cone shape and there can be other chambers leading off it. The most celebrated example is Newgrange, county Meath (see below). Perhaps the most interesting feature of passage tombs is their art. Stones both inside and outside them are decorated with swirls, chevrons, eye-motifs etc. These kinds of tomb are shared with Brittany, in western France. Although they originally had vertical sides faced with stones, most have eroded away to become nondescript earthern or rocky mounds.

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The picture bellow shows Newgrange, a passage tomb in county Meath. It is arguably the most famous passage tomb in the world, if only because the front half of it has been painstakingly restored to look as it probably did when first built 4,500 years ago. This date makes Newgrange at least as old as the Egyptian Pyramids and older than Stonehenge in England. The beautifully carved stones at the entrance make it a worldwide attraction, as does the fact that the Sun shines directly down the main passage at dawn on the winter solstice around December 21st. At the end of the main passage are three smaller chambers off the main passageway that may have been used for burying theThe entrance to Newgrange [16kB] dead. Newgrange is sited in the Boyne Valley - an area of Ireland that is rich with history. Knowth Passage Tomb lies 1km to the west, while the Battle of the Boyne was to be fought 5km (3 miles) east of Newgrange in 1690. Numerous other megaliths pepper the Boyne Valley.

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The picture above shows the entrance to Newgrange . Note the large entrance stone that must be circumvented in order to reach the entrance. This original stone is decorated with swirls and eye-motifs - a rare glimpse at Neolithic art. Above the entrance to the chamber is the roof box that lets the sunlight shine perfectly down the passageway on the winter solstice each year. This may indicate that Newgrange was used as much more than a tomb.

External link: Check out Knowth.com which is an excellent portal to sites giving detailed information on Newgrange, Knowth and other megaliths.

External link: The Megalith Map site contains a list of every megalith in the British Isles.

As will be evident, most megaliths in Ireland are situated in the north part of the island. However, there is a simpler form of Neolithic burial that has been found in the south. Called Linkardstown burials (after a site in county Carlow), they consist of a polygonal stone chamber, paved with stones, and enclosed by large stones that sloped upwards and inwards. A capstone covered the hole at the top. This was then covered in a small mound. Inside has normally been found the remains of just a single human. These 'Linkardstown' burials were on a much smaller scale than the megaliths, and thus not many have survived. Nonetheless, they do seem to be contemporary with their larger contemporaries [4].


Everyday Life in Neolithic Ireland [3,4]

A Neolithic farmer would have lived in a wattle-and-daub house made from wood and thatched with reeds. An example of this is pictured at the start of this chapter. There would have been several such houses in a community, with perhaps 20 or 30 people living together. They would generally have confined themselves to the higher lands of Ireland, by clearing the upland forests wither by axe or by burning it. Field boundaries were created by laying out stone walls. Later in the Neolithic period, this land had begun to acidify and turn into the peat bogs that occupt these areas today. For this reason, some Neolithic farmers had to begin clearing forests in the lowlands. Each Neolithic community may have belonged to a wider group of communities that formed a tribe. These tribes may have traded with each other.

On their farms they grew wheat and other grains, and kept cattle, pigs, goats and sheep. Unlike their Mesolithic predecessors, these people cooked indoors, by lighting a fire in the centre of their house. Meat was cooked on a spit over the fire or, for smaller cuts, by placing it on a stone and placing it directly in the fire. They cut their wheat using a sycthe made from a branch with sharpened porcellanite embedded along it. This wheat was ground by hand using a rounded stone on top of a larger grindstone. This was then used to make bread which was baked on top of a flat stone placed in the fire.

There is some uncertainty as to how Neolithic people buried their dead. Scientists have found a great many human ashes in megalithic tombs, implying that cremation was common. In places where human bones have been found, these are often disjointed, raising the possibility that they were placed in the tomb some considerable time after death. Speculation is that bodies were left in the open to 'deflesh' before being placed in the tomb. They may not have remained in the tomb indefinitely, as they may have been removed to make way for later burials. There is evidence that land pressure was increasing in Neolithic Ireland as the population rose and the cleared upland areas became more populated. Some researchers have proposed that the megaliths were constructed partly as 'status symbols' to claim ownership over land.


The Neolithic Age left a great mark on Ireland. The upland forests had been cleared for farmland, and by the end of the age they were starting to clear the lower forests. Sheep, goats and cows had been imported into Ireland for the first time. Megalithic tombs peppered the landscape. By the time Bronze was introduced to Ireland around 2000BC, Neolithic culture was evident across Ireland.

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The Bronze Age

[3] The discovery of metal was a key event in human history. This was the first material that could be moulded into any desired shape. Additionally, metal was much stronger than stone and could be put to much more effective uses. The first metal that mankind widely used was bronze - an alloy of copper and tin. Although this new technology arrived in Europe around 4000BC, it did not reach Ireland for a further 2000 years. Settlers from France arrived in Ireland around 2000BC, bringing the knowledge of Bronze working with them and the existing inhabitants learned the trade from them. Slowly the culture of these bronze-working settlers merged with that of the Neolithic Irish and gave birth to the Irish Bronze Age.

Metal Working: Ireland was blessed with relatively rich copper deposits, allowing large quantities of bronze to be produced on the island. However, the copper-rich areas did not necessarily coincide with areas that had been important sources of material in the Neolithic era. Thus, the focal points in Ireland moved to regions that in some cases had been relatively devoid of previous activity, for example western Munster.

The copper itself was mined. At Mount Gabriel, county Cork, lies one of the few Bronze Age mines known anywhere in Europe, other than Austria. Dating from between 1500BC and 1200BC, it consists of 25 shallow mine shafts extending about 5 to 10 metres into the slope. Evidence from inside the mines indicates that the copper ore was probably extracted by lighting fires inside the mine and then, when the mine walls had become hot, water was splashed onto them, thus shattering the ore which could then be removed. Counties Cork and Kerry, on the south-west tip of the island, produced the bulk of Ireland's copper and it has been estimated [3 p114] that together the counties produced 370 tonnes of copper during this era. Given the fact that all Bronze Age artefacts so far found add up to around 0.2% of this total, and notwithstanding those that have been destroyed or lost down the years, it seems that Ireland exported a lot of copper during the Bronze Age. By contrast, there is not much tin in Ireland, and most of the tin that was needed to make the bronze seems to have been imported from what is now England.

What was the copper made into? Much of it was made into bronze axes. Although copper is quite soft, the tin that is alloyed with it to make bronze makes it stronger, and able to be used for longer periods before it requires sharpening. Some bronze was used to make awls and some to made daggers. A few of these items have been found decorated with geometric patterns. The Bronze Age saw a marked increase in the manufacture of weapons that were specifically designed to kill human beings. Towards the end of the Bronze Age, very complex items were being produced, sometimes cast and sometimes made from beaten sheet bronze. Examples include chauldrons and horns.

The technology for moulding the bronze improved through the Bronze Age. Initially, items were cast by pouring the bronze into a hollowed out stone, such as the one on the left. When removed, this axe head would have been attached to a wooden handle at its narrow end, while the wide, curved end would have become the blade. By the middle Bronze Age, people had invented two-part moulds, where two hollowed stones were put together and metal poured into a gap at the top. This allowed more complex items, such as daggers, to be produced. By the end of the Bronze Age, people were making wax or fat models of what they wanted to cast, putting clay round them and then heating the clay to melt the wax. They then poured in the metal and chipped away the clay once it had set.

The Bronze Age also saw the first use of gold, which was made in much the same way as bronze, and there are a number of beautiful examples of gold jewellery and other prestigious objects. As gold was useless for any practical purpose, and also because of its beautiful colour and rarity, it quickly became a highly desirable ornamental material. Its use may have coincided with the rise of the first 'aristocracies' in these communities. It is for this reason that the period is sometimes called Ireland's first "golden age" although this is a somewhat falsely romantic way to describe the Bronze Age.


Of course, metal was not the only material used in Bronze Age Ireland. Stone tools were still very important, and there was a large pottery industry. Beaker pottery - named for its distinctive shape - was very common in Bronze Age Ireland, as it was across much of western and central Europe at the time. Beaker pottery was shaped into more complex shapes than in the Neolithic period, and there were a variety of types of pot. Most are ornately decorated.
The land that had been used in the Neolithic period was the upland areas that had been cleared of forest cover. The lowland areas were still largely forested. However, the end of the Bronze Age seems to have coincided with a general downturn in climatic conditions, bringing wetter and colder conditions to Ireland. Many of the upland areas, already acidifying from over-use, turned into peat-bogs which are very poor agriculturally. Places such as the Ceide Fields, in Mayo, which were arable land in the Neolithic period were covered by the advancing blanket bogs. These blanket bogs had been created on the high land by deforestation and over-grazing, but the wetter weather caused them to extend further downhill. (Prof. Mike Baillie, of Queen's University, Belfast believes that natural disasters caused the climatic downturn. See: http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/abstract/baillie.htm.)

At the same time as this, Ireland's population density was rising and this put increased pressure on the land. The only solution was to fell lowland forest, but this required better tools, and the invention of bronze axes came just in time to solve this problem. Thus the Bronze Age in Ireland marks the beginning of the end for Ireland's lowland forests which were systematically cleared over the coming centuries. Many of the myriad of lowland lakes left by the ice age also began to be choked by peat, forming the raised bogs that characterise many parts of lowland Ireland today. As the lakes turned to bog, so the Bronze Age Irish began to build wooden trackways over the bogs, some of which have been found in modern times. A large number of 'hoards' have been found dating from this period - collections of valuables deposited in bogs. The reason why so many people hid their valuables is uncertain, but it is possible that a deteriorating climate may have led to famine and an impulse to hoard valuables. Or perhaps it was simply a custom to place 'offerings' in the bogs.

The limits of the Irish Bronze Age are difficult to state precisely, but is generally accepted to have died away around 500BC when peoples from Europe, belonging to the superior Iron-Age Halstatt culture, arrived in Ireland. The people of this culture are more popularly known as the Celts.


Bronze Age Megaliths and Tombs [1,2,3]

Single Burials: In eastern Ireland, the people moved away from the traditional megalithic types of tomb, which typified the Neolithic, opting instead for simple pits, or cists containing ashes or even skeletons. Hundreds of such cists have been found in all parts of Ireland, dating between 2000 and 1500BC, but their numbers are greater in Ulster and Leinster. Many of these graves have been found with pottery. Some have postulated that society became more egalitarian in this period, resulting in fewer massive burials such as Newgrange.

Wedge Tombs: In the west of Ireland, a new kind of tomb appeared, possibly built by settlers from France who may have been the first of the groups who would become known as the Celts. So-called Wedge Tombs consist of a narrowing stone chamber covered by a mound of earth. The single entrance almost invariably faces south-west. The most common megalithic feature in Ireland, they are found in western Ulster, Connaught and Munster although there is a huge concentration of 120 examples in a small area of northern county Clare. The wedge tombs in Kerry and Cork are the first megaliths to be found in those areas and this is possibly due to the presence of copper ore in that area and subsequent surge in population. Alternatively, as the Wedge Tombs are found primarily in upland areas they may have been the product of a group of pastoralists who grazed flocks on the uplands of western Ireland, before they turned into bog.

The picture bellow shows Baur South wedge tomb

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Henges: A henge is an earthen circle, probably used for ceremonial purposes. Sometimes constructed around or beside previous Neolithic megaliths, henges were constructed in Ireland in a broad period beginning around 2000BC. By far the highest concentration is in the Boyne Valley of county Meath, already home to the great passage tombs of Knowth and Newgrange. However there are other examples in counties Roscommon, Sligo, Clare, Limerick, Kildare and Waterford. There is a famous and well-preserved henge called the Giant's Ring at Ballynahatty, on the edge of Belfast in county Down (see picture on right. By Barry Hartwell). Henges were constructed by scraping soil from the centre of the circle to form a ridge all around. These henges can measure 100 to 200 metres (330 to 660 feet) across. Within the henges archaeologists have found the systematically cremated remains of animals as well as evidence of wooden and stone posts. This indicates that henges were centres for a religious cult which had its heyday in the first half of the Bronze Age. Henges are also found in Britain.

The Giant's Ring, Belfast bellow,

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Stone Circles: Towards the end of the Bronze Age, there appeared another type of ceremonial structure, the Stone Circle. There were constructed in Ireland as well as Britain, and were constructed in large numbers, but mainly concentrated in two small areas. The first is in the Sperrin Mountains of counties Londonderry and Tyrone, while the second is is in the mountains of counties Cork and Kerry. Although both are circles of stone, they are distinctive from one another. The Ulster group are larger, but more irregular and composed of smaller stones. Frequently, a row of stones is set at a tangent to the circle. The most significant example is Beaghmore, near Cookstown in county Tyrone. In the Munster group, the circles are made from larger stones and are associated with stone rows and standing stones. The purpose of stone circles is almost certainly ceremonial. The picture on the right shows a stone circle at Bohonagh, county Cork (image by Dept of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht).

Bohonagh Stone Circle bellow,

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Everyday Life in Bronze Age Ireland [2,3]

It seems that the Bronze Age Irish lived in houses that were similar to those of the Neolithic; that is, rectangular or circular houses constructed from timber beams with wattle-and-daub walls and thatched roofs made from reeds (there is evidence from Carrigillihy, county Cork that some stone houses may have been built [3], but this seems dubious). The circular houses would have been from 4 to 7 metres (13 to 23 feet) in diameter and supported by a central post. Some other houses may have been constructed from sods of earth placed within a wooden frame. Many houses would have had a circular wooden fence making an enclosure in front of the house. There was sometimes a circular ditch around the whole property which was both defensive and kept animals in.

Cooking: If you look carefully and in just the right places, you may see a horse-shoe shaped mound faintly discernible in an otherwise flat field. If so, there is a good chance that you are looking at a Bronze Age cooking place (fulacht fian in the Irish language). A wood-lined trough was dug in the ground and filled with water. Beside the trough, a fire was lit and stones heated in the fire. These stones were then thrown into the water. Once it was hot enough, meat could be boiled in the water. The broken, used stones were hurled off to one side and formed, over the course of some years, the distinctive horseshow mound. These fulacht fian are very common in Ireland, particularly in the south-west. Experiments have shown that the water can be brought to the boil in 30 minutes by this method, and a 4.5kg leg of mutton was successfully cooked in just under 4 hours. Geoffrey Keating, an historian writing in the 17th century, has first-hand accounts of this method of cooking being used in Ireland as recently as the 1600s AD. His account also seems to suggest that the method was also used to heat water for washing.

Language: We cannot know what language that the Bronze Age people of Ireland spoke. When the Celts arrived in Ireland at the end of the Bronze Age, they brought a central European language with them that must have been heavily influenced by the native language or languages of Ireland. It was these Celtic languages that would be the origins of the modern Irish language. While Bronze Age language would be totally incomprehensible to an Irish speaker of today, it may well be one of its distant roots.

Agriculture: Agriculture continued much as it did in the Neolithic, albeit on a larger scale. More lowland forests were cleared to make farmland which was used for grazing or for growing cerial crops. With the climatic downturn in the Bronze Age, getting a living from the land may have been harder than in the Neolithic. However, the use of metal tools probably offset any disadvantage.

War: As the population grew, the average Bronze Age farmer is likely to have traded with nearby farming communities. However, population pressures may also have sparked off wars between communities. Bronze weapons are the first that seem to have been designed with humans in mind.

Society: Most of what we know about Bronze Age society in Ireland is conjecture. However, it is supposed that the steep social hierarchy of the Neolithic became somewhat more egalitarian, judging from the reduction in extremely large-scale burials. However, the number of items of gold that have been found indicates that there must have been at least some form of an aristocracy.

[Fairlie]

The Celtic Iron Age


The Arrival of the Celts:
As the Bronze Age in Ireland drew to a close, there appeared in Ireland a new cultural influence. Developing in the Alps of central Europe, the Celts spread their culture across modern-day Germany and France and into the Balkans as far as Turkey. They arrived in Britain and Ireland around 500BC and within a few hundred years, Ireland's Bronze Age culture had all but disappeared, and Celtic culture was in place across the entire island.

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Celtic Europe around 400BCThe map above, shows how Europe looked around 400BC. Celtic influences (for it was a culture, not an empire) had spread across much of central Europe and spread into Iberia and the British Isles. The Celts called Britain and Ireland the "Pretanic Islands" which evolved into the modern word "Britain". The word "Celt" comes from the Greeks, who called the tribes to their north the "Keltoi", but there is no evidence that the Celts ever referred to themselves by that name. To the south a small upstart republic, with its capital at Rome, was minding its own business. However it was these Romans who, a few centuries later, would supercede Celtic culture across most of Europe when they built their huge Roman Empire, which stretched from Palestine to England.

The Celts had one major advantage - they had discovered Iron. Iron had been introduced to the Celtic peoples in Europe around 1000 to 700BC, thus giving them the technological edge to spread as they did. Iron was a far superior metal to bronze, being stronger and more durable. On the other hand, it required much hotter fires to extract it from its ore and so it took a fair degree of skill to use iron. None of this is to be taken to mean that bronze fell out of use. Rather, iron simply became an alternative metal and many bronze objects have been found that were made in the Iron Age.


Whether or not the arrival of the Celts in Ireland was an actual invasion, or a more gradual assimilation, is an open question [1]. On the one hand, the Celts - who were by no means pacifists - must have arrived in sufficiently large numbers to obliterate the existing culture in Ireland within a few hundred years. On the other hand, other better documented invasions of Ireland - such as the Viking invasions of the 7th and 8th centuries AD - failed to have the effect of changing the culture on an islandwide scale. Current academic opinion favours the theory that the Celts arrived in Ireland over the course of several centuries, beginning in the late Bronze Age with Celts of the early iron-using Hallstatt group of people, to be followed after 300BC by Celts of the La Tène cultural group which formed within the Hallstatt group.

Some have postulated that, as the Romans invaded and took control of the continental Celtic territories of Gaul [France] and Iberia [Spain and Portugal], some of the displaced Celts travelled to unconquered Celtic lands such as Britain and Ireland. The medieval "Book of Invasions" talks about Milesians and Fír Bolg arriving in Ireland. These have been identified with displaced Celts from Spain and Belgium, respectively, although this is conjecture [1].


[b]Early Accounts:[/b]
The earliest pseudo-historical information that we have about Iron Age Celtic Ireland is from Carthaginian, Roman and Greek writers, who probably got their information from sailors who had been to the British Isles. There are writings from the 4th century AD by the Roman Avienus which are thought to be based on accounts from an early Greek voyage in the 6th century BC. These describe Celts in France and in the North Sea, where the British Isles are. He calls Ireland Insula Sacra (Holy Island) and its inhabitants gens hiernorum, thought to be a Latinisation of the Greek word for Ireland, Ierne. This, in all likelihood, is a modification of the word Ériu, which may be an original Celtic word for Ireland and a root of the later Irish word Eire and eventually the English word Ireland. The Greek Pytheas refers to the British Isles as the Pretanic Islands, which is derived from Priteni - definitely a Celtic word. In 52BC, the Romans were referring to Ireland as Hibernia, possibly extracted again from the Greek word Ierne.
Click to view Ptolemy's map of Ireland [56kB]By far the most interesting historical account of these early times is that of the Greek Ptolemy. His map of Ireland, published in Geographia, was compiled in the second century AD, but based on an account from around 100AD. No surviving originals exist, but we do have a copy dating from 1490AD.


Historians have been able to use this fascinating map to identify some of the Celtic tribes living in Ireland at the time. Many of the names cannot be identified with known tribes (particularly those in the west), and the names have been badly corrupted by being passed word-of-mouth. However, others are readily identifiable. Also on the map are the names of rivers and islands which can be identified with existing features. All this information has allowed historians to create a picture of the probable Celtic tribes living in Ireland at the time (100AD). Our map is given below. Note that Ireland was by no means isolated. Some of the tribes straddled both sides of the Irish Sea, while others had relations in Gaul (France).



Ireland in 100AD [10kB]


Roman Influences and Irish Colonies:
In the last centuries BC, the rest of Celtic Europe fell to the expanding Roman Empire. The Celts of southern Britain were conquered in 43AD. Stopping short of the Picts of modern-day Scotland, the Roman emperor Hadrian built his famous wall between the Celts of the north and Roman Britain. Did the Roman armies invade Ireland? The answer is no, but we know they did consider it. During a foray into southern Scotland, the Roman General Agricola looked across the North Channel towards the Irish coast. The writer Tacitus reports that Agricola "saw that Ireland... conveniently situated for the ports of Gaul might prove a valuable acquisition" and that "I have often heard Agricola declare that a single legion, with a moderate band of auxilaries, would be enough to finish the conquest of Ireland" [2]. However an invasion never took place - not because the Irish would be too hard to defeat, but simply because the Romans decided it wouldn't be worth the effort.
However, Ireland did come under heavy Roman influence, even if not under its rule. In the first and second centuries AD, there is evidence that there was sporadic trading between the Irish and the Romans of Britain. Tacitus, writing in the first century AD, says of Ireland "the interior parts are little known, but through commerical intercourse and the merchants there is better knowledge of the harbours and approaches" [5]. Evidence of a Roman trading post has been found near Dublin. However, it was not until the fourth and fifth centuries AD that there is evidence of prolonged Roman influences in Ireland. Roman coins and other implements have been found in Ireland. There is evidence that the language spoken by the Eóganacht of Munster, who arrived at the end of the Iron Age, had been heavily influenced by Latin. Finally, it is certain that Ogham, the first written scripts in the Irish language, was based on the Latin alphabet

Towards the end of the pre-Christian period, as the Roman Empire and its colony in Britain declined, the Irish took advantage and began raiding western Britain. Irish Colonies in Britain, 5th century [9kB]Picts from Scotland and Saxons from Germany raided other parts of the colony. As their raids got ever more successful, the Irish began to colonise western Britain. The Érainn of Munster settled in Cornwall, the Laigin of Leinster settled in south Wales while the Déisi of south-east Ireland settled in north Wales. Cormac of Cashel (writing much later, in 908AD) records that "The power of the Irish over the Britons was great, and they had divided Britain between them into estates... and the Irish lived as much east of the sea as they did in Ireland" [2]. These colonies were all defeated by the Britons within the next century or so, although Irish kings seemed to be still ruling in south Wales as late as the tenth century.
The map bellow shows these colonies.

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Dún Ailinne - Dún Ailinne, in county Kildare, appears to have been the royal site of south Lenister. It underwent several transformations, but at its height it seems to have included a circular enclosure 29 metres (96 feet) in diameter with several tiers of benches around it. Around the time of Christ, a circle of timbers was built, then burned and buried in a mound. Like Emain Macha, Dún Ailinne seems to have served a ritual purpose.

Tara - The Hill of Tara in county Meath is home to a large number of monuments. There is a Neolithic passage tomb called the Mound of the Hostages as well as some post-Iron Age ringforts. Around the main part of the site is a large earthen enclosure. Tara was an important site throughout the Celtic period where it was a royal centre and, ultimately, the seat of the High King of Ireland.

Turoe Stone
[5kB]Celtic Constructions: Decorated Stones

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A large number of carved stones were created in the last centuries BC. Probably serving a ritual purpose, they were stones up to 2 metres (7 feet) in height and feature complex swirling patterns of a style common with central European Celtic cultures. We can only speculate on what kind of ritualistic purpose it may have served. Some have argued that these are the most durable of a variety of materials used for these objects, such as wood. The most famouse example is the Turoe Stone, in county Galway, which is pictured on the left (Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland).

Celtic Constructions: Hilltop and Promontory Forts [1]
Most kingdoms, or Tuath, in Ireland had a hilltop fort which was used either as a permanent residence for the king or as a temporary refuge in times of conflict. They are typically built on the top of a hill and surrounded by a stone wall. Often these sites coincide with previous Bronze Age burials, and frequently they showed a lack of respect for these previous monuments, sometimes re-using their stones. Unlike the royal sites, which were made from earthen banks, they had very well constructed stone walls made from close-fitting cut stones. Some of the most well defended hillforts were built with one edge at the top of a cliff. So-called promontory forts were built both on inland mountains and coastal cliffs.


Everyday Life in Celtic Ireland:
Although very like the Celtic cultures of the rest of Europe, that of Ireland had been influenced in part be the preceding Bronze Age culture. So Ireland's culture was not totally like that of mainland Europe. However, in many regards it was very similar. Much of what we know about specifically Irish culture has come down through the years in the form of Heroic Tales, such as the Ulster Cycle which tells of the exploits of Cú Chullain, the Hound of Ulster. Once thought to be historicaly unreliable, these Heroic Tales describe a way of life that fits well with what we now know about the Celts of mainland Europe. Thus it seems that, while the events described may have been embelished over the years, the underlying themes and props in the stories may be accurate descriptions of life in Iron Age Ireland.


It was, in many ways, a culture based around war. Ireland was divided into dozens - possibly hundreds - of petty kingdoms. Within the kingdoms, it was the blacksmiths, druids and poets who were held in high esteem: the blacksmiths for making the weapons of war, the druids for making prophesies and soothsaying, and the poets for putting the exploits of warriors to verse, to be sung around the cooking fires. The aristocracy in this culture was made up of the warriors, who sought fame and recognition by doing battle with their enemies. The young warrior would be initiated by mounting his chariot (a two wheeled wooden cart pulled by two horses), before proceeding to battle and cutting off the heads of his enemies to bring them home as trophies [1]. At the celebratory banquet afterwards, the warriors would compete for the "hero's portion" of the food being served. The weapons brandished by these warriors consisted of round wooden, bronze or iron shields, with iron spears or swords. The spear seems to have been more common than the sword.

Political Structure
By the later Celtic period, Ireland was ruled by a series of perhaps 100 to 200 kings, each ruling a small kingdom or tuath. The kings came in three recognised grades, depending on how powerful they were. A rí túaithe was the ruler of a single kingdom. A 'great king', or ruiri, was a king who had gained the allegiance of, or become overlord of, a number of local kings. A 'king of overkings', or rí ruirech, was a king of a province. Ireland had between 4 and 10 provinces at any one time, because they were always in a state of flux as their kings' power waxed and waned. Today's 4 provinces (Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connaught) represent only the final state of these borders. Each province had a royal site, a place where important events took place. In 100AD there were royal sites at Emain Macha, near Armagh; Tara, county Meath and Dún Ailinne, county Kildare as well as other locations (see Celtic constructions above).

For most of the civilian population, however, life was spent in small farming units consisting of a wooden or wattle-and-daub house within a circular enclosure. Most would have had access to common land on higher ground on which to graze animals. Dairying was common, but almost everyone grew grain crops such as corn, oats, barley, wheat and rye. The land was ploughed using wooden ploughs pulled by oxen. Almost all farming was subsistence-based, and there was very little trade in food.

The only interruption to the daily ritual of grazing animals and growing crops would have been cattle-raids from neighbouring warriors, who may have pillaged and burned on their way to battle, although in general warfare seems to have been a highly formalised affair in which the peasants were usually not involved. By 400AD there were probably between half a million and 1 million people living in Ireland. This number would have fluctuated due to the recurrent plague and famine which affected all prehistoric cultures in Europe.

Brehon Law [7]
The law that the Celts of Ireland used has been called Brehon law. Forms of Brehon Law were used in Ireland for hundreds of years. A full treatment of Brehon Law is beyond the scope of this article, but the idea was that a person's identity was defined by the kingdom in which they lived. A peasant had no legal status outside the tuath, with the exception of men of art and learning. Those who were tied to their tuath were unfree and worked for the king. All land was owned by families, not by individuals. Wealth was measured in cattle, and each individual had a status measured in terms of wealth. Almost any crime committed against an individual could be recompensed by paying a fine equal to the status of the individual. For example, a 50 cows for an important person, 3 cows for a peasant. There was no death penalty; but, an individual could be ostracised from the tuath in certain circumstances.

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The language spoken by the Celts in Ireland was Celtic, a variant of the Celtic languages which were used across Europe. In the British Isles, there were at least two dialects in use: Brittonic (P-Celtic) which was spoken in southern Britain and France, and Goidelic (Q-Celtic) which was spoken in Ireland and northern Britain. Brittonic is the root of modern Welsh, Cornish and Breton. Goidelic is the root of modern Irish and Scots-Gaelic. Brittonic and Goidelic must have been heavily influenced by the Bronze Age languages of Ireland.

The first written Irish appeared in the fifth century, around the same time as the initial Christianisation of Ireland. Called Ogham script, it consists of a series of grooves on the corner of a stone. Each combination of grooves represents a different letter of the Latin alphabet, and a number of Ogham stones have been found in Ireland and in Wales. Those in Ireland are mostly along the south coast. Usually they give the name of a person or ancestor and were probably commemorative. The picture above shows the Ogham stone at Coolmagort, county Kerry [4

[Fairlie]

The Coming of Christianity

Jesus Christ spent around 30 years in Palestine (what is now Israel) around the year 1AD. His ministry must have been extraordinary, for his followers spread rapidly across the known world with the message that he had taught. The early missions around the eastern Mediterranean are chronicled in the book of Acts in the Bible, as well as the letters of St Paul. Despite widespread persecution under the Romans, during which time thousands of Christians were thrown to the lions or crucified, the Roman Empire ultimately adopted Christianity as its religion. From the Mediterranean it spread northwards into Gaul and it reached Ireland around the late 300s or early 400s.

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Celtic Cross [2kB]The first recorded missionary to Ireland was Palladius, who was probably from Gaul [France]. He was sent by the Pope to be bishop to the "Irish who believe in Christ". Patrick himself stated that Palladius' mission was a failure. However, other historical documents from outside Ireland indicate that the mission of Palladius was very successful, at least in Laigin (Leinster), and that he set up a number of churches. [1]. Tradition says that Palladius' visit to Ireland was in the year 431.

St Patrick Perhaps the most famous missionary to Ireland was St Patrick. However, a small point of caution is needed here [2]. It is widely believed by historians that the missions of St Patrick were embellished and enshrined by Patrick's monastery at Armagh in their (ultimately successful) bid for primacy over the church in Ireland. In creating what is referred to as the 'Cult of Patrick', Armagh exaggerated the importance of Patrick and diminished the importance of the other missionaries, possibly even attributing some of the work of these other missionaries to Patrick. That said, St Patrick is such an important part of Irish culture that it would be a mistake to ignore him.

We know very little for certain about Patrick. According to his own "Confession", he was born in Roman Britain - probably near Hadrian's Wall in northern England - the son of a wealthy official. His mother may have come from Gaul [France]. When he was 16, sometime in the early 400s, he was kidnapped by an Irish raiding party and sold into slavery in Ireland. As Roman Britian collapsed, it was increasingly common for Irish, Pict and Saxon raiders to pillage its coastal settlements and it seems that Patrick fell victim to one of these raids. Patrick worked as a slave for 6 years tending sheep, traditionally believed to be on Slemish Mountain, county Antrim, but it seems possible that he was, in fact, somewhere near the Atlantic Ocean in county Mayo or Sligo.

Patrick says in his Confession that he discovered God during his time of captivity, and took to praying a hundred times a day. After 6 years, Patrick managed to escape from captivity, walked the 200 miles to the east coast and managed to negotiate passage aboard a trading ship to Gaul [France]. There, he probably trained to be a Christian Priest and spent time in Auxerre. He then received prophetic dreams where he heard the people of Ireland near the 'western sea' call him to come and walk among them again. He then travelled to Ireland as a missionary, and it seems that he never left. The year traditonally given is 432, but it seems more likely to have been around 460 [3].

Patrick concentrated his work in north-east Ireland, and his first church was at Saul, near present-day Downpatrick. He preached to the Kings and their households and met with varied levels of success. One of his methods was to 'Christianize' the Celtic Pagan festivals. For example, Patrick reputedly lit an Easter bonfire on Slane Hill near the Hill of Tara while the King was having his own Pagan bonfire there. The King was enraged, but he took the opportunity to preach and managed to make some converts. He is famously said to have used the 3-leaved Shamrock to explain the concept of the Trinity: God as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (although this story is almost certainly a myth). Patrick died in Ireland and is traditionally believed to be buried on the Hill of Down in Downpatrick, county Down. A stone marking the traditional burial spot was added in 1901 and the site is now a popular tourist attraction.

The Rise of Monasticism The churches set up by Patrick and other missionaries were fairly simple affairs. During the late 400s, hundreds of churches were set up. They were unlike the churches that we would recognise today: most were small wooden buildings, with the occasional small stone structure and would not have accommodated more than a few dozen people at a time. Each tuath (petty kingdom) had a 'bishop' to oversee the church's work in it.

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In time, the Irish church matured and by the 500s a number of monasteries were set up. Initially intended to be places of retreat from the world, they attracted the patronage of the kings and the rich and became influential institutions in their own right. Many extended control over other monasteries, with Armagh ultimately claiming primacy over all churches in Ireland. The network of buildings that eventually grew up on monastic settlements - the hired workers, craftsmen and artisans - were, in a sense, the first 'towns' in Ireland. A Celtic monastery was not of the church-and-cloisters type that appeared in the middle ages. Rather, it usually consisted of an enclosure with a small stone church and a number of cells were the monks lived individually. By their nature, some were in the most remote areas imaginable. Sceilg Mhicil was perched on an outcrop of rock in the stormy north Atlantic off the coast of county Kerry. The picture above [4] shows the ruins of the monastery on Sceilg Mhicil (Photo: Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland). Many monasteries were set up in connection with the ministry of Patrick, for example the great monastery of Armagh.

One of the most prominent Irish Saints was St Colum Cille (also known as St Columba and St Colmcille). Colum Cille was of the province of the northern Uí Néill (in present-day Donegal), a prominent relative of the King who became a Christian and evangelised in the Irish colony of the Dal Riata in Scotland (see Celtic Iron Age for details). Colum Cille believed in people becoming "Exiles for Christ", by leaving their homes to go and live with other Christians in isolated places, thereby coming closer to God. He set up monasteries in Ireland, such as that at Derry, before setting up the monastery of Iona off the western Scottish coast in the year 563. Colum Cille's establishment successfully converted the Dal Riata before converting Northumbria [Northern England] by 627. The great Northumbrian monastery of Lindisfarne was founded in 635. Thus, Britian was Christianised by a missionary from north-west Ireland. Iona and Armagh together became the most influential monasteries in Ireland. The map below shows the principal monasteries in Ireland as they were around the year 650 [5].

The Irish church was fairly simple, because the hierarchical structure of the continental church was found to be incompatible with the network of small kingdoms in Ireland. However, Roman missionaries had arrived in southern England and there were disagreements between the Celtic church and the Roman church. This was resolved at the Synod of Whitby of 664 in which it was decided that the church in Britain would follow the Roman practices. However, the people in Ireland resisted the changes and so Romanism did not have much impact in Ireland.

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One of the most important works of the Irish monasteries, besides catering for the needs of the local population, was in the production of books. These are the great illuminated manuscripts, such as the Book of Kells, which were hand written copies of the Bible and other books. Beautifully decorated by hand, these books were usually written in Latin, which was introduced by Patrick. The Latin alphabet was also introduced, replacing the more awkward Ogham scripts. Although Latin was the language of education, Celtic-Irish remained the language of everyday life.

Irish Influences in Europe
As Ireland's monastic establishments grew, they became centres of learning as well as of evangelism. It is for this reason that Ireland has been termed the land of "Saints and Scholars". After Colum Cille, and his evangelical successor Aidan, had set up the monasteries in Scotland and Northumbria (northern England), the Irish turned their attention to southern England. St Fursa preached in East Anglia (eastern England) in the 6th century before travelling to Gaul (France) and setting up churches there. St Columbanus, of Bangor Monastery in northern Ireland, went to Gaul in 591 and founded 2 monasteries in France before travelling through modern Germany, Switzerland and Italy. He is buried in a Monastery he founded at Bobbio, in northern Italy. By the 9th century, Irish scholars followed the missionaries and managed to gain important academic roles in the courts of Kings such as Charlemagne of the Franks. Irish foundations can be found in France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Italy and their influence was been left in places as far afield as Vienna, Rome and eastern Germany.


Dynastic Changes
Of course, all through the early Christian period, the dynastic quarrels between the Celtic kings of Ireland continued. The Provinces were groups of kings who had submitted their tuath to the authority of one of the other kings. This king was the king of the province. Around the time of St Patrick, the Ulaid ruled must of northern Ireland, Munster was in the south, Laigin was in the south-east and Connacht was in the west. The Uí Néill ruled an area from central-eastern Ireland to the north-western corner.
The southern Uí Néill spent the early Christian period expanding eastwards at the expense of Laigin. The power of the Ulaid, whose capital was at Emain Macha (near Armagh), was slowly diminished by the "Three Collas" who drove them out of their western lands and set up the Province of Airgialla (also known as Oriel). Airgialla eventually captured Emain Macha. In response to being driven eastwards, some of the Ulaid founded a colony in Scotland. This is the colony of the Dal Riata (see Celtic Iron Age for details).

The map above shows the state of the provinces of Ireland around 650AD.

By the early 700s, the spread of Christianity and continued growth of the concept of a 'province' meant that the Kings of individual tuaths ceased to be regarded as kings, and were referred to increasingly as dukes or lords. The provinces evolved from being federations of dozens of tuaths, to being more closely knit units whose king was from one of the more prominent families. It became more common, then, for there to be dynastic disputes within provinces over which family held the kingship. A province can be almost regarded as an independent country, although without the well-delineated borders of today.

The period 700-850 marks the growth in the influence of the Uí Néill. Their northern half was dominated by the Cenel nEoghan dynasty, who lived in the east of the territory and they went on the offensive against the province of Airgialla, driving them out of their northern territories over the century 750-850. By 804, the Uí Néill had become the protectors of the monastery of Armagh. Meanwhile, the southern Uí Néill penetrated further into Laigin in the period 700-800, driving them out of the Boyne valley and taking control of the royal site of Tara.

In the 700s, the power of Connaght rose dramatically, and they began to expand eastwards, further dividing the northern and southern Uí Néill and founding the secondary province of Bréifne around present-day Cavan and Leitrim. This had the additional effect of splitting the Uí Néill into two parts, referred to simply as the Northern Uí Néill and the Southern Uí Néill.

It was around about this time that the kings of Ireland began to realise that it might be possible to extend control over the entire island - a concept not previously considered. This gave rise to the term High King and, although nobody could yet legitimally use the term, it did not stop the Uí Néill eyeing it up.

Everyday Life in early Christian Ireland
Society in Early Christian Ireland was heavily tiered. At the top of society was the kings. Laterally, these were the rulers of the large Provinces. They lived in large enclosures, often fortified, and had a large retinue of staff. The kings maintained their position by ensuring the loyality of the lords in their province, although it was not unknown for a lord to challenge the sitting king for the position. Below the kings were the lords. The lords were the heads of the individual tuaths, which had been independent kingdoms in the pre-Christian period. A lord owed allegiance to the king, and usually paid his dues in the form of military service. It was not common for the peasantry to engage in warfare. Some lords may have lived in crannógs, which are artificial islands built from wood in lakes. Easily defended, but hard to build, crannógs were apparently built in two intense phases of 420-650 and 720-930. Some crannógs survive, but many have been destroyed by drainage schemes. There is an excellent reconstructed crannóg at the Ulster History Park, near Omagh, in county Tyrone.

Below the lords were the commoners - grád Fhéne in Irish. Commoners were attached to a lord by clientship - célsine in Irish - which was similar to medieval feudalism. The landlord gave the commoner a payment and a certain number of animals and in return the commoner gave various food products to the lord at regular intervals. For the lord, having many clients increased his prestige and ensured a steady supply of food. For the client, it provided a source of food and protection. It was not without its perks. By law, the commoner was entitled to one night's feasting at the lord's residence each year - not a trivial expense. In general, extended families lived together in early Christian Ireland. The poorer commoners would have lived in wooden houses in the open countryside. Wealthier commoners would have built their houses within an earthen enclosure about 30 metres (100 feet) in diameter. So-called ringforts are amongst the most common historical features in Ireland, and are readily identifiable. There are almost 50,000 known examples although these are being rapidly destroyed by urban growth and agricultural mechanisation.

Below the commoners were the cottiers and landless men - bothach, fuidir in Irish - who were free men but did not have any land and hired themselves out as labourers either to lords, commoners or to monasteries. At the bottom of the hierarchy were the hereditary serfs - senchléithe in Irish - who were part of the estate of their landlord. Slavery was widely practiced in Ireland at the time. The slaves were usually supplied by traders, who acquired them from raiding trips in Britain. Alternatively, some families sold children into slavery during times of famine. In some cases, prisoners escaped their fates by being taken on as manual labour by a monastery.

In terms of agriculture, most farmers had animals. Cows were grazed on common land and beef provided the bulk of meat that was eaten. This was supplemented by some pork, and mutton for the poorer people. The cows also provided dairy produce which formed a large part of the diet in the form of milk, salted butter and cheeses. Unfenced strips of arable land were found nearer the houses. These were used for cereal crops such as oats, barley, wheat and rye. These were eaten in the form of porridge, bread or ale. The grain was ususally stored in pits or souterrains, because it was common for enemies to burn the grain of your peasantry at time of war. Wild fruit and vegetable growing provided the remainder of the diet. Survival was almost purely subsistence, and if there was a bad year for both animals and crops there was a famine. Famine was all too common in this era, probably causing the population to fluctuate continuously. New technology aided the farmers somewhat: the horizontal mill and a more efficient plough were adopted in the 400s.

Marriage was very unstable: divorce and remarriage was common. In all tiers of society, but most notably with the nobility, polygamy was practiced. Despite the best efforts of the church, this trend persisted all through the period. The effect of polygamy was that the lords had huge families, not all of which could maintain the lordship status. This resulted in a general drift of lineages down through the ranks of society.


Anglo-Saxons in Britain
Although this is a history of Ireland, events in Britain in this period are so important that they need to be covered. The Angles, Jutes and Saxons were groups of people living in what is now Denmark and northern Germany. Starting in 440AD, warriors sailed across and landed on the eastern seaboard of Celtic Britain, in ever increasing numbers. They met stiff resistance, but after two centuries of continuous battling the Anglo-Saxons (as they became known) had established control over most of southern Britain. Only Wales, Cornwall and Scotland remained in control of Celtic kings. Settlers from the Anglo-Saxon homelands arrived in large numbers. They did not push the Celts out of England; rather they assimilated them into the Anglo-Saxon culture. In time the Anglo-Saxons established their own separate kingdoms in Britain, and the situation in the year 800 is shown by the map on the right [6]. It is the Angles who were destined to give their name to the country they had colonised: Angle-land or England, and the word Anglo- is still used to refer to anything English. The Anglo-Saxon invasion is significant for Irish history since it marks the end of the Celtic era in Britain, but its continuation in Ireland: a significant point of divergence in the story of these sister islands.

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The Coming of the Vikings

Who were the Vikings?
They were a group of people who originated in modern-day Denmark and Norway. In the 700s, pressure on land in Scandanavia had forced many nobles and warriors to seek land elsewhere. Some of these were younger sons, who stood to inherit nothing of their father's estate. Noblemen with little to lose began to gather together groups of warriors and go down the coast pillaging settlements. They sold their booty for money, much like the black markets of today, and this became the means of making their living. The invention of the longboat made it possible for these warriors to sail across the North Sea to attack Britain, Oseberg Ship [11kB]France and Ireland as well. In these areas they became known as the "Norsemen" (literally, north-men) and laterally as the "Vikings". They called themselves "Ostmen". The Vikings who first attacked Ireland were Norwegian while those in Britain were usually Danish. Being pagans, the Vikings did not have any respect for Christian symbols and sites. The picture on the left shows the Oseberg Ship, a reconstructed Viking raiding boat (Photo by Universitetets Oldsaksamling, Oslo).

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The first raids in the British Isles was in 793, when the great monastery at Lindisfarne was sacked. In Ireland, Rathlin island monastery was burned by the Vikings in 795. Other prominent monasteries that were attacked included Holmpatrick, Inishmurray, Inishbofin and Sceilg Mhicil. Sceilg Mhicil's abbot died of thirst as a Viking prisoner. St Colum Cille's great monastery at Iona was burned in 802. For the next 30-40 years, the Vikings engaged in hit-and-run raids where they landed a small number of ships at a settlement, spent a few days pillaging and burning it before heading back to Scandanavia to sell their booty. The Vikings were after two types of booty - riches and slaves - which they carried off to sell. They soon found that the monasteries were the richest sources of both goods and this is why monasteries suffered so much. However, the Vikings also attacked a lot of grád Fhéne (commoner's) dwellings.


The brutality that the Vikings displa

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This was the most intense period of Viking activity, and the Irish Kings seemed to be able to do little to prevent the wholesale destruction of large tracts of their Provinces. The southern Uí Néill were routed by the Vikings when they attempted to drive them out. By the end, many of the monks themselves had taken to fighting the Vikings. However, just as it looked as if Ireland was about to be conquered by the Vikings, and just as the Irish began to develop tactics with which to more effectively attack them, the raids died away. The last major Viking raid of this phase was in 851 by which time they appeared to have turned their attention to Britain. The map below shows the attacks in this period.

Viking raids 795-851 [14kB]

Meanwhile, many of the Viking settlements developed and grew into towns. Their town of Dubhlinn had a thriving Norse community by the second half of the 800s, and had become the principal supplier of slaves in the British Isles. In time it became a great merchant town, until it was defeated by an Irish attack in 902. After that, the Vikings moved their power base to the Isle of Man and to the growing territory that the Vikings were carving out of Anglo-Saxon England. Other Viking towns had also been defeated, for example Cork in 848, Vadrefjord [Waterford] in 864 and Youghal in 866.


The Second Period of Raids
A second phase of raiding began in 914, with the arrival of a large fleet of Viking ships in Waterford harbour. They promptly re-captured their settlement of Vadrefjord [Waterford] from which the Irish had expelled the first Vikings half a century earlier. Reinforced by a second fleet which arrived the following year, the Vikings launched a series of offensives deep into the province of Munster, and later Leinster, where they met little Irish resistance as they pillaged both ecclesiastical and grád Fhéne (commoner) settlements. They plundered the monasteries of Cork, Lismore and Aghaboe, among others.
In 917, the Vikings re-captured the settlement of Dubhlinn [Dublin] which the Irish had captured in 902. The king of the Uí Néill, Niall Glúndub, who was the most powerful king in Ireland, decided that the Vikings had to be stopped. He brought together a combined force from the Uí Néill and enlisted the help of the forces of Leinster. They marched against the Vikings in Munster in 917. However, the Vikings routed the Leinstermen, while the forces of the Uí Néill retreated from Munster with no decisive success. Two years later, in 919, Niall Glúndub tried again and attacked Dubhlinn. However, his forces were again routed by the Vikings and Niall Glúndub himself was killed and "the cream of the Uí Néill fell with him" [2]. It was not true to say that it was "the Irish against the Vikings". In fact, some Irish kings and lords formed alliances with Vikings to attack other Irish lords.

The Vikings continued to raid inland from their towns of Dubhlinn, Cork and Vadrefjord. In 921, they founded a new town on the south-east tip of Ireland called Weisfjord (Wexford) and a year later founded the town of Limerick near a ford at the mouth of the river Shannon on the west coast. The Vikings in Ireland, however, spent a lot of effort consolidating the Nordic Kingdom that their Viking collegeaues had been carving out of Anglo-Saxon England (by defeating and assimilating Northumbria, East Anglia and parts of Mercia - see a map of England before the Vikings came). This kingdom would become known as the Danelaw. Back in Ireland, as the influence of the Vikings declined, they concentrated more on developing Dubhlinn as a trading city and by 934 exercised control over the other Viking towns in Ireland. In its day, Dubhlinn was one of the most important cities in the Nordic world, as a trading and slaving centre. In 952, Dubhlinn split from the Danelaw and from then on Dubhlinn had its own dynasty of Viking Kings.



The Vikings eventually settled down in the lands they had conquered. By 950, the Vikings had stopped raiding in Ireland and developed instead as traders and settled in the lands around their towns. The Vikings in England [3] largely became farmers and fishermen. In France, the Vikings formed the Kingdom of Normandy on the north coast - which would play a major role in history a century later when William of Normandy would defeat England in 1066. The Vikings left many placenames in Ireland including: Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Wexford, Strangford, Leixlip, Carlingford, Youghal, Howth, Dalkey and Fingall [an area of modern-day Dublin]. A few of their words were also adopted into the Irish language.


The First High Kings of Ireland

Despite these Viking attacks, life continued as normal in Ireland's provinces. As discussed in the previous section, the power of the Uí Néill rose during the 700s and this continued into the 800s. After conquering the province of Airgialla (central Ulster) between 750 and 850, the Northern Uí Néill turned their attention to the eastern province of Ulaid. The Ulaid, recognising the supremacy of the Uí Néill, did not attempt to resist and they were under Uí Néill control by the mid 800s. The Northern Uí Néill themselves were ruled by the Cenél nEógain family, and they were bitterly resented by the Cenél Conaill of western Ulster and the Ulaid in the east. The southern Uí Néill, on the other hand, had gained control over northern Laigin. Split by the expansion of Connacht into Bréifne in the 700s, the two halves of the Uí Néill were united again, in the east, by the end of the 800s.
Later writings referred to the kings of the Uí Néill as the first High Kings of Ireland, but it seems unlikely that this in reality referred to anything more than an aspiration. After 940, a bitter power struggle broke out between the royal families of the Uí Néill. Foster [2] sums this up as "a united Uí Néill kingdom was in the making, and the struggle was to determine who was to be the ruler of it". The King of the Northern Uí Néill, Domnall ua Néill, who was also the overall Uí Néill king, attempted to rule the Southern Uí Néill directly and even garrisoned forces in their territory. The next king was Mael Sechnaill II of the Southern branch. The Uí Néill had gone from being an obscure people in western Ireland to the rulers or controllers of most of northern and eastern Ireland. Although they never really exercised control over Connacht or Munster, their later proponents preferred to style them as the first High Kings.

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Everyday Life in the Viking Period

This must have been a terrifying period for the Irish who were subjected to these raids. Scribbled in the margin of a manuscript, the words of a 9th century monk reveal some of the emotion: "The wind is fierce tonight. It tosses the sea's white hair. I fear no wild Vikings, sailing the quiet main" [2]. Many of these hand-written illuminated manuscripts - being of no financial value - were burned by the Vikings and today we only have a handful of those that were written. While these were great setbacks for the ecclesiastical community, few of the monasteries in Ireland failed to resurrect themselves after raids. Unlike Britain and France, where whole monastic communities disappeared, the Irish seem to have been spared the worst of the Vikings' wrath [2]. In fact, Cork monastery was practically next door to the nearby Viking settlement but it emerged from the Viking period largely intact.

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Devenish Round Tower above,]The ordinary grád Fhéne (commoners) found that their ringforts had been rendered obsolete by the character of the Viking raids. The earthen walls and ditches around their houses may have been an adequate defence against relatively infrequent Irish attacks, but the Vikings came in such numbers that they easily breached the banks to steal animals, plunder and burn property and capture slaves. Thus both ringforts and crannogs fell out of use over the course of the 900s. They were replaced by a more heavily defended underground chamber called a souterrain. A souterrain is built by digging a deep ditch, lining it with stone walls, putting a roof on it and covering it over. Used mainly as places of refuge, as opposed to storing goods, the tunnels of souterrains could be over 100 metres (330 feet) in length. Although difficult to find due to their hidden nature, over 3500 known souterrains survive in Ireland.

Christian Songs

Some Celtic Christian songs survive from the Viking period. Perhaps the most famous is Be Thou My Vision, written around 1,200 years ago. It is clearly a reflection of its turbulent times, with its comparison of to God to a "strong tower". Verse three is:

Be Thou my breastplate, my sword for the fight,
Be Thou my whole armour, be Thou my true might,
Be Thou my soul's shelter, be Thou my strong tower,
O raise Thou me heavenward, great power of my power.

At the start of the Viking period the Irish monasteries consisted of earthen enclosures containing a church, various outbuildings and the monks' residences. The Vikings found that it was very easy to ransack these largely defenseless settlements. In time, the monks learned how to frustrate the Vikings, by building tall stone towers known as Round Towers. The door was placed one floor up, accessible by a ladder. Inside the tower, each floor was accessed by further ladders. If Vikings were sighted, the Monks would grab as much food and valuables as they could, climb into the tower and pull up the ladder. The Vikings would then raid the empty monastery while the monks watched from the safety of the tower. Even if the Vikings did get into the Monasterboice [10kB]tower - and they did not try hard to do so - the Monks simply retreated further up the tower by pulling up more ladders. Such a strategy did not save the monastery itself, but did save the Monks and some of their belongings from being captured. Round towers were constructed across Ireland, a large number of which are still intact today. The picture above shows the round tower at Devenish, county Fermanagh [the steps are a modern addition] (photo by Edwin Smith). [5]

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Another feature to appear at this time was the High Cross. It was customary for monasteries to display a wooden cross, but from the 700s onwards it became common to carve them from stone. Some had Biblical scenes carved on them, to assist in teaching the largely illiterate population. Some have theorised that they were made so large to prevent the Vikings from stealing them or knocking them down, although this is conjecture. The picture on the left shows the High Cross at Monasterboice, county Louth (picture from [4])

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Brian Boru and the Dynastic Upheaval



The Rise of Brian Boru
Ireland in the 10th century had been dominated by the power of the Uí Néill but, curiously, it was their own zealousness that led to the rise of their most effective opponent in the race for the High Kingship. In the mid 900s, the power of the dominant royal family in Munster, the Eóganacht, was being sapped by attacks from the Uí Néill. This allowed the Dál Cais who resided in the Shannon basin area of north Munster, to increase their dominance in the province. They were helped by the fact that the Shannon river was growing in importance with Viking trade.

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Brian Boru In 976 Mathgamain, Lord of the Dál Cais, was assassinated by the Vikings of Limerick. The Vikings, who had converted to Christianity, ruled a territory around this settlement at the mouth of the Shannon. Although it was in the centre of Munster (see map), they were tolerated because they made little trouble and brought trade. However, this political act changed this. When Mathgamain's brother, Brian Bóruma (Brian Boru) succeeded him to become Lord of the Dál Cais, he wasted little time. Motivated by a desire for revenge for his brother's death, and undoubtedly a healthy dose of ambition as well, Brian Boru set about gaining power. Brian Boru is seen in an engraving on the left.

Brian Boru's first action was to attack the Vikings of Limerick. King Ímar of Limerick and his sons took refuge in the monastery of Scattery Island, but Brian Boru must have decided that he did not much care for sacred traditions. He broke into the sanctuary, slaughtered the Vikings and desecrated the church. Although only founded 50 years earlier, Limerick would remain in Munster's hands for the next two centuries. By 980 he had surpassed the Eóganacht and crowned himself King of Munster. Thirsty for more power, Brian Boru next formed a strategic alliance with the Vikings of Vadrefjord (Waterford) to penetrate his armies deep into Connacht and the relatively weak province of Leinster (Laigin) in the 980s.

Meanwhile, the Uí Néill became increasingly alarmed at the rise and rise of King Brian Boru of Munster and sought to limit his growth. During the 980s, King Máel Sechnaill 2nd of the Uí Néill tried various tactics, but by 997 came to the conclusion that he could not be lord over Boru. Therefore the two Kings held a meeting at Clonfert, within the Viking Kingdom of Dubhlinn and agreed to divide Ireland between them. Máel Sechnaill II granted Brian Boru effective High Kingship over Munster, Leinster and Dubhlinn and retained the allegiance of Connaught and his own province for himself.

However, not everyone accepted the arrangement. In 999, the Lords of Leinster and the Viking King of Dubhlinn revolted against his rule. Undeterred, Boru marched his armies back into Leinster and defeated them heavily at Glenn Máma. Descending on Dubhlinn at the height of winter, he attacked it, plundered the city and burned down its fortress. Eventually King Silkenbeard of Dubhlinn submitted to Brian Boru and, in the coming decade, was his supporter. In 1002, Máel Sechnaill II himself finally submitted to Boru. After this, Brian Boru set out to assert his control over the whole island. He made two circuits of the island in 1005 and 1006 when he penetrated the furthest reaches of the Kingdom of the Uí Néill. His power seemed almost complete.

The Battle of Clontarf
Perhaps tragically, Brian Boru was killed at the moment when he was about to realise his dream of becoming the true High King of Ireland. The dream had begun to unravel in 1013 when it became clear that it was only Brian Boru's military might, not any kind of allegiance, that was holding his islandwide kingdom together. When the lords of Leinster and the Viking King of Dubhlinn held a second revolt, this was accompanied by general anti-Boru discontent in the rest of Ireland. Boru had his armies despoil the Leinster countryside as far as the Wicklow mountains before laying siege to the city of Dubhlinn itself for 4 months. But the Vikings held out, and when they had not submitted by Christmas the weather forced Boru to retreat. Knowing Boru would return in the spring, angrier than ever, the Leinstermen and the Vikings spent the winter frantically rallying support from western Scotland and the Isle of Man and amassed an army in the city.

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Battle of Clontarf [5kB]Brian Boru did indeed return, with his armies, in 1014. The two armies met at Clontarf, a fertile plain with a Monastery to the north-east of Dubhlinn. (Today the battle site is beneath the northern suburbs of Dublin city.) The battle was extremely bloody with several thousand men killed and, in the event, Brian Boru's army won and most of the Vikings took to their boats and retreated to the Isle of Man. However, Brian himself was killed (legends say he was hacked to death by an axe-wielding Viking who sneaked into his tent). In legend, the Battle of Clontarf has become one of the most famous in Irish history because it is seen as part of a national struggle, marking the expulsion of the Viking invader. However, it was probably not significant in that way: the power of the Vikings was already in decline after 980 and were being absorbed by the Irish. In reality, the battle actually marks the failed attempt by Leinster and Dubhlinn to assert their independence from Munster.

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Wood Quay Hiberno-Viking House above,

Nevertheless, the power of the Vikings was broken for good at Clontarf, and the future of Dubhlinn was now definitely in Irish hands. Although the Vikings were allowed to rule Dubhlinn themselves for another 70 years, it had been becoming more hibernicised over the previous century. As a city it was large for its time, rich and important. Thus, during the 11th century Dublin became an important aquisition for any King with eyes on the High Kingship and, by the end of the 1000's it had overtaken Tara to become the de-facto capital of the island. Dublin thrived and remained a wealthy trading city. Excavations in the 1970s at Wood Quay in Dublin found incredibly well-preserved remains of a thriving Hiberno-Viking city. The picture on the left shows the remains of a house from this period uncovered at Wood Quay. (The site has since been largely destroyed by the construction of the widely- despised Dublin council headquarters, although key archaeology was completed in time.)

Dynastic Struggles in 11th century Ireland
The next 150 years in Ireland, from Clontarf in 1014 to the coming of the Normans in the second half of the 1100's saw an unprecedented phase of dynastic warfare and general upheaval in Ireland. Few historical accounts attempt to unravel the complex twists of the 11th century which caused this unrest. After the death of Brian Boru, King Máel Sechnaill 2nd of the Uí Néill reasserted himself as High King of Ireland until he died 8 years later in 1022. At this point, confusion reigned and all the dynasties fought together for power.
The 11th century saw Irish politics become more like that of the rest of Europe. Kings spend longer and longer away from home fighting battles, and so they had to employ staff to govern their Kingdoms. Individual regions, fortresses, and the few cities, were given governors to oversee the day-to-day management and the Kings began to set out laws and taxes across their entire realms. Warfare too was modernised. The Irish had long adopted Viking weapons such as long axes, but now they were utilising technology such as Cavalry and navies. These gave rises to new posts of office, such as Admirals and military Commanders. Most of these posts were held by subservient Lords from the King's own kingdom.

It also became more common to reward allegiance and encourage subservience by granting land to noblemen who were able to rule them as Lordships within the control of the King. For example, the King of Connacht made his son the Lord of Meath in the early 1100's, although he did not prove to be up to the task. Other land was given by charter to the church, although not always with purely divine motivations. In 1101, the King of Munster granted the fortress on the rock of Cashel to the church who promptly set up an Archbishop at the site.

The picture becomes clearer by the start of the 1100s. At this point there were four main Kingdoms in Ireland: Munster, ruled by the O'Brien dynasty, of whom Brian Boru was part; Connacht, ruled by the O'Connor dynasty; the Uí Néill (whose land was called Tir Eoghain), ruled by the Mac Lochlainn dynasty and Leinster, ruled by the Mac Murchada dynasty. From 1086 until 1114, the High Kingship was in dispute. King Muirchertach O'Brien of Munster was the most powerful, but King Domnall Mac Lochlainn of the Uí Néill was sufficiently strong to stop him becoming supremely powerful.

This all changed with the succession of Turlough O'Connor to the throne of Connacht. He immediately set about fortifying his Kingdom, building 'castles' around his borders and amassing a large army and navy. Between 1115 and 1131 he systematically destroyed the power of Munster, and then spent the rest of his reign trying to become High King of all Ireland. Upon his death in 1156, the task fell to his son, Rory O'Connor who had duly become King of Connacht. Rory knew that he had to capture Dublin in order to claim to be High King, but others had their eyes on Dublin too. The Kings of the remaining two provinces, King Muirchertach Mac Lochlainn of the Uí Néill and King Dairmait Mac Murchada of Leinster formed an alliance to make a rival bid for the High Kingship. While not achieving this goal, they did manage to hold Connacht's aggression at bay. They also managed to subdue Dublin itself, although it proved very difficult to control a city that did not wish to be controlled.

Although the weak partner in the alliance, Mac Murchada was able to use his powerful Northern allies to keep his enemies in Munster and Connacht at arms length. This all changed in 1166 when, in a stroke of fate, King Muirchertach Mac Lochlainn of the Uí Néill was assassinated by vassals from his own Kingdom. Suddenly without his northern ally, Mac Murchada was dangerously exposed and it is no surprise that the Dubliners wasted no time in pairing up with King O'Connor of Connacht to take their revenge. They easily captured Leinster and drove Dairmait Mac Murchada entirely out of Ireland. At this point, Mac Murchada appealed to the King of England for military assistance and thereby changed the course of Irish history.


Reform of the Christian Church
From its golden era before the Vikings, the Christian Church in Ireland had slowly been secularised and, in many ways, corrupted. According to the historian Donnchadh ó Corráin [2], the principal problem was that it was too decentralisd - the individual abbots of monasteries had gained far too much power. Indeed, many abbots were not even churchmen, some accepted bribes for positions, some had concubines and sanctuary was abused (famously Celtic Cross [2kB]demonstrated when Brian Boru slaughtered King Silkenbeard of Limerick in the sanctuary of Scattery Island monastery). This is not to say that Ireland's church was rotten to the core - the monastic schools were still vibrant and there were many saintly monks and bishops.
There were those in Ireland who set about reforming the church, but additional help came from the church in Europe who had been busily reforming the French church. The Europe-wide revivial in Monasticism saw new Monastic orders bring Irish establishments under their control. The Cistercians were the first of the medieval orders to set up in Ireland, when St Malachy set up an abbey at Mellifont in 1142. Other orders would follow in the coming century founding new abbeys and taking over old ones.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury in England wanted to assert control over the Irish church, and set about establishing links with the church in the influential former Viking city of Dublin. However, when the Irish church was reformed, over the course of three synods at Cashel (1101), Ráth Breasail (1111) and Kells-Mellifont (1152), the church was organised under an Archbishop placed at St Patrick's monastery at Armagh, much to Canterbury's displeasure - although the church in Dublin remained under Canterbury's control for some further time. The country was sorted into dioceses, church leaders had to obey stricter moral guidelines and the monasteries were stripped of much of their land. All in all, the reforms were at once a triumph and a disaster. A triumph because the church was now much less corrupt, but a disaster because it destroyed the basis of Irish learning, poetry and script.


Changes in Britain
It is impossible to understand the next phase of Irish history without reference to events in Britain. In Britain, the period of history from 800 to 1100 was also a time of upheaval, death and warfare, and at least two successful invasions. The Vikings had invaded Anglo-Saxon Britain on a far greater scale than they ever had in Ireland, completely obliterating and colonising the Christian Kingdom of Northumbria as well as East Anglia and large parts of Mercia (see a map before the Viking invasion). This area was called the 'Danelaw'. Only under the leadership of Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, did the English manage to stop the advance of the Vikings. It was Alfred who persuaded the individual kingdoms to unite and, in 927, his grandson Aethelstan was crowned "King of all the English" in the city of London, essentially England's first 'High King'. This was the foundation of the Kingdom of England. Over the next 150 years, the two regions merged to form a more coherent Anglo-Norse England, ruled mostly by Danish Kings.
The Normans were the descendants of Vikings who had settled in an area of northern France known as Normandy to this day. In a complex interplay of lines to the throne and broken promises, Duke William of Normandy decided the English throne was his. He invaded England in 1066, and through a series of battles, most notably at Hastings, took the throne and was crowned King William 1st of England, although he is better known as William the Conqueror. This was the phase in European history when all kings were seeking to expand, and England was no exception. Bordered to the north by the newly-united kingdom of Scotland, the King of England instead penetrated into Celtic Wales and, though inter-marriage and other means, controlled half of France by the mid 1100s. It is no surprise, therefore, that when the opportunity arose to spread his royal rule across the sea to Ireland, the English king took it.

[Fairlie]

The Anglo - French, Norman Invasion 1150 - 1300,


Historians are agreed that English and French involvement in Ireland was an historical inevitability, but the surprising manner in which it actually happened could not have been foreseen at the time.

Chapter contents:
Anglo - French
Strongbow in Ireland
The English King Intervenes
Expansion and the Irish Reaction
Anglo-French Government
The Church
Everyday life in Anglo-French Ireland


Anglo - French ?

Historians are divided as to what to call the people who came to Ireland in 1169. Although many came from England, many other barons came to Ireland from France. The Normans (from northern France) had taken over English government only 100 years before. Therefore, historians variously use the terms "Cambro- Norman", "Anglo- Norman", "Anglo- French" or simply "Norman". Here we use "Anglo- French", but any of the above terms is acceptable. As time went on, and England evolved, the term gets replaced with the more modern word "English".

Strongbow in Ireland:
As discussed in the previous section, Dairmait Mac Murchada the King of Leinster had been expelled from Ireland after being defeated by King Rory O'Connor of Connacht and the Dubliners. A ruthless warrior now humiliated by defeat, Mac Murchada's only goal was to win back his Kingdom. With this in mind, he sailed to Britain and sought a meeting with King Henry 2nd of England in 1166, in the hope that Henry might help him in his quest.
King Henry met Mac Murchada, but was reluctant to help him. He had just become King, and his hold over England was still weak and he did not wish to start an expensive war. Nevertheless, he had been given permission by the Pope shortly before to claim Ireland as part of his kingdom in order to reform the Church. As a compromise, he authorised Mac Murchada to privately recruit anyone he could from the English populace but had no more to do with the matter himself.

Mac Murchada then travelled to Bristol, on the west coast of England, where he recruited the Earl of Pembroke, Richard FitzGilbert de Clare (better known as Strongbow) as well as a handful of lesser Anglo-French barons including Robert FitzStephen, Richard FitzGodebert, Maurice FitzGerald, Raymond le Gros and Milo de Cogan. (See a note on Norman names.) Strongbow was no friend of King Henry, and the feeling was mutual - he had opposed Henry's bid for the throne and was paying for it by being ignored. In return for helping him win back his kingdom, Mac Murchada promised Strongbow his daughter Aoife in marriage and the Kingdom of Leinster upon Mac Murchada's death. The lesser barons were promised land, including the Viking city of Wexford. Since he had little future in England, the prospect of inheriting an entire kingdom in Ireland must have been very appealing to Strongbow.

Returning to Ireland in 1167, Mac Murchada had to wait two years for his reinforcements to arrive. In May 1169 the lesser barons that had been recruited in Wales arrived with 600 archers and cavalry, and recruited 500 Irishmen loyal to Mac Murchada to swell their army further. With this they managed to force the Viking city of Weisfjord (Wexford) to submit once again to King Mac Murchada. He gave Wexford and the surrounding area to these lesser Welsh barons as payment. After further successes which saw him regain much of his kingdom as well as the allegiance of Dublin, he signed a treaty with O'Connor that allowed him to be restored as King of Leinster, provided he recognised O'Connor as High King.

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Ireland in 1171 [14kB]However, Mac Murchada had grown greedy and began to plot how he might use his new Welsh allies to usurp O'Connor and become High King. He sent a message to Strongblow asking for further reinforcements, Strongbow himself landed near-present day Waterford in August 1170 with 1000 men. They attacked and defeated the Viking city of Vadrefjord (Waterford), thereby breaking the treaty with O'Connor. Mac Murchada kept his word to Strongbow and gave him his daughter Aoife as wife, and thereby Strongbow became heir to Leinster's throne. Strongbow's men then went north, attacked and defeated Dublin expelling its Norse leader, Lord MacTorkil, in a boat.

The situation changed suddenly in May 1171 when King Dairmait Mac Murchada died and Strongbow was crowned King Richard of Leinster, after suppressing a short-lived revolt, and became the first non-native to be King of an Irish province. The other Kings in Ireland were astounded at how quickly and successfully an Anglo-French Lord had become legitimally established in Ireland. After mustering an army of 60,000 and aided by the exiled Lord MacTorkil of Dublin, King O'Connor laid siege to Dublin. However, Strongbow turned the tables by storming out from the city walls and defeated O'Connor with the superior Anglo-French military technology and tactics. O'Connor retired humiliated to Connacht, High King only in name. Meanwhile, other Anglo-French Lords continued to harry Leinster's old enemies, invading Mide (Meath) and sending raiding parties as far as Bréifne. The map above shows the situation in 1171 with the restoration of the Kingdom of Leinster under King Richard (Strongbow) and the continued attacks northwards. The Orange area is the extent of Anglo-French rule in Ireland.

A note on Anglo-French names: In Anglo-French custom, children were given a new first name and a surname that was their father's first name. So, for example the surname of a man who is the son of Maurice FitzPatrick would be FitzMaurice. Simiarly, the son of Gerald FitzMaurice would have the surname FitzGerald. In later times this custom stopped and people began to keep the same fixed surname.


The English King Intervenes:
When word got back to King Henry of England that the man who he knew as the Earl of Pembroke (Strongbow) had established himself as King of a province in Ireland, he was furious. The way he saw it, he had given permission for his citizens to help Mac Murchada militarily, not to rival his authority as King. Henry, rather pointlessly, issued a decree forbidding Strongbow to go to Ireland, cut off the supplies from England and set out for Ireland himself with large army arriving in Waterford in October 1171. Realising that the King could and would defeat him, Strongbow intercepted Henry before he had even arrived offering apologies and begging forgiveness.
Henry's anger must have relented for he let Strongbow remain Lord of Leinster, provided he submitted authority to the King of England. Realising that King Henry was their only hope against Strongbow's expansionism, the less powerful Irish kings decided it would be in their best interests to have him on-side. Henry thus spent quite a period receiving delegations from the Irish Kings of Munster, Bréifne, Airgialla and Ulaid (see map above) all of whom submitted to King Henry as their overlord and agreed to pay him tribute. Only the former High King, Rory O'Connor of Connacht, and the Kings of the Northern Uí Néill did not submit to Henry.

Henry carefully divided the parts of Ireland for which was now overlord. He set aside Dublin which was no longer to be part of Leinster, but rather owned by the King and chartered to the city of Bristol. The province of Meath (Mide) which had already been invaded by Strongbow's men, was instead given as a liberty (a semi-autonomous lordship) to Hugh de Lacy, a loyal supporter of Henry, which must have angered Strongbow. Henry returned to England in April 1172 leaving the provinces of Meath and Leinster ruled by two Anglo-French Lords, with Irish kings loyal to King Henry in all the remaining kingdoms other than Connacht and the northern Uí Néill. The Treaty of Windsor in 1175 between King Henry 2nd and King Rory O'Connor of Connacht recognised O'Connor as High King of all lands outside Meath and Leinster, and in turn O'Connor would collect tribute payments from those areas.

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Dundonald Motte above,

]The next few years saw de Lacy and Strongbow devote much of their energies to containing resitance across their new liberties. They established Motte-and-Bailey castles (fortified mounds with a courtyard beside them) in all troublesome areas and established the feudal system (of peasants working on lands owned by the lord) as an investment. The picture on the left shows the remains of an Anglo-French Motte-and-Bailey castle which can be seen today in Dundonald in county Down. Dozens of examples survive across Ireland.

When Strongbow died in 1176, the liberty of Leinster passed into the hands of King Henry who granted all his rights as Lord of Ireland to his youngest son Prince John. Prince John was Lord of Ireland until he became King of England in 1199, but in that time he showed little respect for the remaining Irish Kings. His courtiers famously tugged the beards of Irish Kings who came to see him.

In the lands that had been secured by the Anglo-French, an extensive process of colonisation took place. Agricultural estates were established, and market towns established to sell the goods locally, nationally and to the rest of Europe. English, Welsh, French and Belgian settlers arrived to settle the lands of the Anglo-French Lords, while the Irish who remained were reduced to the status of serfs working on the estates. For most poor Irish this was largely academic: there wasn't a noticeable change to their quality of life. But things were different for the old Irish aristocracy, practically none of whom was able to retain their status and lifestyle. For more details of life under the Anglo-French, see the Everyday Life section below.


Anglo-French Expansion and the Irish Reaction:
The expansion of the Anglo-French colony in Ireland continued under the Lordship of Prince John in the period 1170 to the end of the 1200s. The response of the Irish Kings was largely to submit to the more powerful invaders. However, the general populace was less enthusiastic and a whole area of folklore developed with retrospective predictions about the invasion and promises of a liberator who would come and free Ireland from the Anglo-French. The Anglo-French, in turn, had their own prophecies of the invasion and their destiny to succeed. The story of the expansion of the colony is largely made up of the actions of individual barons, with occasional input from the King.
By 1177, the Anglo-French ruled Leinster and Meath. The Lordship of Leinster was ruled by the King ever since Strongbow had died the previous year. The Liberty of Meath was ruled by Hugh de Lacy. The Carrickfergus Castle [11kB]expansion of the colony took off that same year when John de Courcy invaded and took over Ulaid (modern day Antrim and Down). The region became known as "Ulster", probably derived from the word "Ulaid" with the "-ster" appended to make it sound like the more prominent areas of Munster and Leinster. De Courcy founded the town of Carrickfergus the next year and began work on an elaborate castle there (see bellow, of Carrickfergus Castle as it looks today).

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To the south, in 1185, O'Brien's kingdom in eastern Munster was granted to Theobold Walter (who would found the Butler dynasty that was a key to many events in the years to come), Philip of Worcester and William de Burgh. This region of Ireland became known as "Ormond". Their armies took 8 years to subdue the region. Shortly afterwards, in 1201, William de Braose was granted land in Limerick. Meanwhile, back in Ulster, de Courcy fell out of favour with King John, who gave permission to Hugh de Lacy to invade, which he duly did, becoming Earl of Ulster himself. This title he retained apart from the period 1210-1227 when he himself fell out of favour with the King. His brother Walter de Lacy, who had inherited Meath, lost control of that lordship from 1210 to 1215.

The period 1226 to 1235 saw a protracted war in western Ireland when Richard de Burgh invaded the Irish Kingdom of Connacht. Perhaps surprised by how much the Irish had developed their military technology since the time of Strongbow, it was a hard war to win and while de Burgh did emerge with most of Connacht in his hands, it was not an easy victory. The conquest of Connacht was a famous event for several centuries. In this same period, another prominent family of the future - the FitzGeralds, or Geraldines - took possession of north Kerry and Waterford. In the 1240s they gained further land in the newly conquered lands of Connacht, Kerry and Fermanagh. They built a castle at Belleek in Fermanagh but they did not truly control the area and the local Irish lost little time in asserting their authority by burning the new castle. After that, Fermanagh reverted to Irish control.

By the middle of the 13th century, Hugh de Lacy of Ulster was dead and the Irish kings of Tyrone and Donegal stopped paying tribute entirely. When this caused little response from the English King, the Kings gained confidence and formed an alliance with the humiliated King of Connacht. In 1255 they launched a series of raids into Ulster, killing colonists and burning their towns. By 1259 the revolt had become more widespread, with the Irish of Munster revolting against the Anglo-French Lords there. In fact, in 1261, the Irish defeated an English army sent to avenge atrocities committed against colonists. However, the revolt fizzled out after this as some of the key leaders were killed. It was to be a century before the Irish would have another successful revolt against the English.

After the revolts had died down, the vacant Earldom of Ulster was granted to Walter de Burgh, who was also Lord of Connacht. When the Geraldines agreed to cede Sligo to de Burgh in 1296 it confirmed de Burgh as ruler of all of Connacht and all of Ulster, second only to the King of England in power. The territory of Thomond was granted to Thomas de Clare in 1275, the man who would eventually give his name to the modern county there. In the south, the two prominent families that were emerging were the Geraldines of Desmond (modern Cork and Limerick) and the Butlers of Ormond (modern Tipperary). The former territory of Leinster was by this stage divided into a multitude of smaller Lordships as families divided their land between heirs. Meath was divided into two - the two halves being called Trim and Meath. The Lordship of Leinster was divided into four, forming the liberties of Wexford, Kilkenny, Carlow and Kildare.

The map of Ireland around 1250 is shown by the map below. The map makes a strong distinction between Irish and Anglo-French (Norman) lands. However, it would be a mistake to believe that these regions were anything like modern frontiers, with border guards peering warily across no-mans land. In practice, the borders were blurred, with a lot of everyday movement of trade and persons to-and-fro. Anglo-French and Irish lords routinely signed agreements with each other against common foes. In later centuries, this interchange was to become so pronounced that it would be legislated against.

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[b]Anglo-French Government:[/b]
As with almost everywhere else in Europe, the Anglo-French followed the Feudal system of government. This differed from the Irish method of government in fundamental ways. Under feudalism, the King owned all land. He granted this land to Lords in return for annual tribute in the form of money, soldiers or goods. Some Lords paid their tribute by becoming a Knight, an armed nobleman, to ride with the King into battle. The Lords, in turn, granted parcels of their lordships to Peasants (ordinary people) in return for money, a soldier at time of war or some goods. Many lords set up market towns in their lordships to encourage trade and to convert goods into money. At the bottom of the hierarchy were landless peasants who were granted a plot of land on another peasant's plot in return for manual labour on the farm. The Irish system, by contrast, saw no overall ownership of land, but rather each individual Lord had absolute ownership of their land. The commoners worked on the Lord's land in return for accommodation and food.
The Anglo-French introduced feudalism to Ireland, but the administration of government evolved with the expansion of the colony, and thus different parts were ruled in different ways. In Anglo-French society, rich landless men recruited armies and conquered land for their King, in the hope that the King would reward them by making them a Lord of some land somewhere, often the same land they conquered. This was the only way they could make themselves in the world and this was the motivation for much of the expansion of the colony in Ireland. It was a form of capitalist expansionism - privatised warfare.
The status of Ireland was clarified in 1199, when the Pope gave permission to King John of England to make Ireland into a Kingdom and to declare himself as King of it. In 1210, a decree was issued that made all laws passed in England valid in Ireland also, thus uniting the two legal systems.
At the head of government there evolved a "Great Council", which met in Dublin, where the King's royal officials and the chief noblemen met to make decisions concerning Ireland. The country itself was divided into a series of administrative units that had different degrees of autonomy. The liberties exercised a lot of self government, being governed by a seneschal (chief officer) who operated the courts and treasury. They had to swear loyalty to the King but the King's officials were not allowed into the liberty and the King could not collect taxes. Most liberties appeared towards the start of the Anglo-French period when there was not much financial stake in the colony. As the colony grew, the King increasingly created counties in preference because he could collect taxes there. Key liberties in 1250 included Meath, Trim, Kildare and Ulster. The counties (also known as shires) operated like liberties except that they were under Royal control. The King appointed a Shire Rief (origin of the word sheriff) to manage the county, its treasury and its court. The King took opportunities as they arose to get rid of the liberties and eventually, but not until the 1600s, all of Ireland's administrative units had become counties. The map above shows the liberties and counties that existed in 1250. The chartered territories were lands not under Anglo-French control, but rather under Irish Kings and Lords. These men and the King of England signed a charter that let them keep their lands as long as they submitted to the Anglo-French and collect taxes. Connacht was a chartered territory until it was invaded.


Changes in the Church:
Throughout the medieval period, and indeed until the twentieth century, the church was of pivotal importance in Irish society and culture. With the church now divided across lands ruled by native Irish Lords and lands ruled by Anglo-French lords, it became difficult to administer the whole. Keen to assert control over the church as well as the land, the King of England repeatedly attempted to ensure that all dioceses in their lands should have Anglo-French bishops. A law passed in 1217 banning Irishmen from the post was abandoned after the Pope expressed his outrage at such discrimination.
The reform of the Irish church in the century before the Anglo-French came helped usher in the new monastic houses that were springing up across Europe. The Cistercians founded 33 monasteries across Ireland between 1142 and 1230 and also established a large number in Britain. They were very different from the preceding Irish monasteries, and reached the height of their success in the 1200s, before Monastic Changes in Ireland [24kB]declining after this time due to financial difficulties and general stagnation. Augustinian and Benedictine orders founded a large number of monasteries of their own. All of these orders had a lot of land but, unlike the earlier monasteries, they let the land out to members of the public. Such lands were called granges, a term that can still be found across Ireland.

As the diagram bellow shows, one of the most obvious differences with the new monasteries was their layout. While a 10th century monastery was quite spartan with a small church and individual huts, a Cistercian monastery had a huge, cross-shaped church along with a much more comfortable arrangement of rooms for relaxing and working. The remains of both of these monasteries can still be seen today.

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Everyday Life in Anglo-French Ireland:
Athough at the start, the Anglo-French were in Ireland to acquire power, this soon turned to a desire to make money. They had no overall plan, and each baron largely pursued whatever plan came to mind. Faced with a population explosion across medieval Europe, the Anglo-French barons intended to use Ireland to grow food to sell and, thereby, become rich and powerful. They established a feudal system of agriculture, under which peasants were employed in, and lived on, the estate as tenants. Some barons who had larger amounts of land tried a more adventurous approach. They set up a town with a market, and granted between 3 to 10 acres of land to each tenant. They used these market towns to sell their agricultural surplus. Many of these towns thrived and exist to the present day, for example Kilkenny, Trim and New Ross.
Towns A medieval town in Ireland had walls. Few of these have survived to the present, with the exception of Carlingford in county Louth whose medieval walls and gates are well preserved. Other walls, such as Derry's, date from much later and are not medieval. The wall was not really for defence, more as a status symbol although they did come in useful when the Irish raided them. Inside the town, people would have live in wooden two- or three-storey houses with wealthier merchants having stone houses. Streets were narrow and winding - today there is often not enough room for two cars to pass on these streets! The towns thrived on their markets, which were crowded, bustling and exciting affairs and most people would have had a trade, such as bakers, blacksmiths, tailors and shoemakers. Sanitation was a major problem, as people threw their waste onto the streets below and there was no sewering other than a drain in the road which only worked when it rained. A fabulous experience of what it was like to live in a town in Ireland around 1300 can be had by visiting the Geraldine Experience in Tralee, county Kerry. Visitors to the centre ride in small vehicles through a reconstruction of 14th-century Tralee complete with sights, sounds and even smells! Well worth travelling to visit.

Countryside A medieval villein (peasant) and his family lived in a one-room house made from a wooden frame with a thatched roof and wattle-and-daub walls. There were no windows. Cooking was done in an open fire in the middle of the house and the smoke escaped through a hole in the roof. A fence in the middle of the house separated the animals from the people, because animals usually spent the night indoors. The concept of sleeping people and animals separately was a post-medieval idea, so this did not seem odd at the time. Some houses had a platform in the roof space for sleeping on. People slept on straw-stuffed mattresses and the only other furniture would have been a table with stools. Surrounding the house were perhaps 20 to 30 other houses. Surrounding this community (called a village because it was occupied by villeins) were two or three large fields, up to 200 acres in size, where the villeins grew crops. Each villein was allocated a number of strips in each field which they could farm. Most of the crop was given to the lord as rent, with the remainder being kept for food. Usually the village had a forest where fallen wood could be collected for fires and pigs could be grazed. An area of land that nobody owned (called a common) could be used by everyone for grazing. The people were not rich and their coarse clothes were holey and must have been cold.

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The Norman Decline, 1300 - 1450,


Despite their superior fighting capability and successful conquests, the Norman colony in Ireland began to decline after 1250 AD. Firstly, there were not enough dedicated Normans to occupy all the land they had acquired. Secondly, after 1216, the Norman Kings back in England had lost interest in Ireland and no longer sent military assistance to defend the Norman Lords in Ireland. Thirdly, the Normans had begun to be 'Irishised' and many had married Irish people and had learned the Irish language and traditions. Lastly, many Normans who had come to seek their fortune on the 'new frontier' became tired of Ireland and left again.
The more anti-Norman Irish lords began to realise that they had a chance against the Normans again. Aided by hired mercenaries from Scotland, called the 'Gallowglasses', they began to attack the property of the Norman Lords. In 1261, the Normans of Kerry were defeated and the O'Connors defeated the Normans of Connaught in 1270. And in 1274, the Normans of Wicklow were defeated. By 1300, large chunks of Ireland were once again ruled by the Irish Lords. The Norman King did not regard Ireland as strategically important (aside from trading goods) and was not prepared to waste his forces protecting the Normans there.

Until this point, the Norman kingdom consisted only of England and the lands in Ireland. In 1296, however, King Edward 1st of England sought to expand northwards and invaded Scotland. He took control, and removed the Stone of Scone (an important royal treasure of the Scottish Royal family that was finally returned 700 years later in 1996). For 10 years the English-Normans ruled the Scots. In 1306, however, a Scot named Robert Bruce hatched a plot to regain Scottish independence and with help of some Scottish lords, he defeated the English at Bannockburn in 1314. The victorious Robert Bruce then became King of Scotland.

The Irish Lords in Ulster, O'Neill and O'Donnell, were impressed by this turnaround in Scotland and wondered if Bruce could help them defeat the remaining Normans in Ireland. Robert Bruce knew that the English got many supplies from Ireland so the two sides worked out an agreement whereby Robert's brother, Edward Bruce, would become High King of Ireland in return for military assistance. Edward landed at Larne in Ulster (just north of present day Belfast) in 1315 with a large army, rapidly defeated the Normans of Meath and then continued southwards. However, many Irish didn't like him because he disrespected the Irish peasants and damaged their property by marching through it rather than going around it. Edward, nonetheless, was crowned King of Ireland in May 1316. Edward was joined by Robert Bruce later that year, and the brothers marched on the Normans of Limerick, Tipperary and Kilkenny and plundered their property. Robert returned to Scotland but Edward was finally defeated and killed by the Normans on 14 October 1318. Although the Bruces were gone, the Normans were weakened and the Irish now felt able to defeat them themselves. The pestilence of the Black Death of 1348 merely added to the decline of the Normans.

In 1360, King Edward 3rd finally realised that he was on the verge of losing control of the last Norman parts of Ireland and sent his son Lionel to try to reverse the declining trend. He arrived in Dublin in 1361 with an army and recruited local Normans. He then launched a series of unsuccessful offensives into Leinster and Munster. Faced with no good news to come home with, he held a conference in 1366 called the "Parliament of Kilkenny". This conference was designed to pass legislation for the Norman-controlled parts of Ireland, and attempted to reverse the trend of Norman decline by separating Irish and Norman culture. The laws passed banned Normans from marrying Irish, speaking Irish, using Irish law or dress, and listening to Irish music or stories. However, few Normans obeyed the laws - the families of many had been in Ireland for 2 centuries, and no longer felt patriotism towards England. Lionel died in 1367, with not much success to his name.

Richard 2nd became King in 1377. He landed at Waterford with a massive force of 10,000 men and a new invention: artillery. Faced with such a force, many major Irish Lords submitted to the English. Richard let these men hold their land if they promised loyalty to the English king. The Irish Lords of Leinster, however, were evicted from their estates and plans were made for English Lords to be set up instead. The land was temporarily left unoccupied, but as soon as Richard left in 1399 war broke out. The Irish Lords of Leinster returned to their land in Leinster and Richard's viceroy was murdered. Not long afterwards Richard was murdered by his cousin Henry who took the throne of England as Henry 4th.

The Norman decline continued for the next half century. By 1450, English control in Ireland had been reduced to a 20 mile wide strip around Dublin, known as the Pale. The English defended this land, and the Irish were unable to completely drive the English off the island. The Pale was surrounded with a fence to keep out the Irish. (This is where the phrase 'Beyond the Pale' comes from.) The 3 major English Lords whose estates were within the Pale continued to exist, and formed alliances with the neighbouring Irish and became very powerful. Outside the Pale (particularly Munster), former Norman Lords had practically become Irish, and many of them joined with the native Irish in their hatred of the English.

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The Protestant Reformation and the Offaly & Munster Plantations
1541 - 1598:


In 1533, when Henry 8th tried to marry Anne Boleyn, the Roman Catholic church forbade him from doing so because he was already married. Henry found no way to get around this other than removing the right of the church to prevent him. So he declared that the Pope was no longer head of the Church of England, and made himself head instead. This meant that it was he, not the Pope, that had the final word on church matters in England. He was thus able to permit himself to marry Anne Boleyn. In 1536, the Church in Ireland was ordered to follow suit and recognise Henry as head of the Church. However most ordinary Irish people refused to recognise Henry as leader of the church and continued to regard the Pope as head. Some Bishops 'reformed' to Henry's church but soon became Roman Catholics again. The other thing Henry did was to dissolve the many monasteries in England and Ireland - places that had existed for over 11 centuries - by selling the land and scattering the Monks. This greatly angered the peasant population, as the Monks had often been the ones who nursed the sick and cared for the poor in the local communities.
In 1549, the Church of England was changed again, this time by King Edward 6th. Across Europe a large number of Roman Catholics, led by a German priest called Martin Luther, were protesting against the corruption in the Roman Catholic church at the time. Their protests and actions became known as the Protestant Reformation, and their followers were nicknamed 'Protestants'. King Edward became very interested in the Protestant movement. He felt that the Church of England was still too Roman Catholic and ordered that confession, processions and the doctrine of transubstantiation be removed. Thus the Church of England became much more similar to the new Protestant churches that were appearing all over Europe. Most Irish refused to accept these changes to the church, not least because the new rules were written in English whereas they could only speak Irish. Therefore Ireland remained Roman Catholic while England gradually became more and more Protestant.

When Queen Mary, a Roman Catholic, came to the throne in 1553, she repealed the anti-Rome laws and made England Catholic again. This was welcomed by the Irish, but Mary did not seem to regard her common religion as any reason to treat Ireland any more kindly than her Protestant predecessor. She sent her army into what is today counties Laois and Offaly (west of Dublin) in 1556 and forcibly removed most of the native Irish from the area and gave it to English (and mainly Catholic) settlers. For 50 years, the Irish who had been removed relentlessly attacked the settlers and it wasn't until 1600 that the attacks faded away.

In 1558 Queen Elizabeth 1st came to the English throne and made England Protestant again. Although she was funding colonies in the vast, newly discovered, land to the west across the Atlantic she still regarded Ireland as a much more convenient place to colonise, being so much closer and of similar climate to England. Her reign was dogged by rebellions in Ireland. An attack by the O'Neills of Tyrone was defeated in 1561 and two revolts by the FitzGeralds of Cork and Kerry were put down in 1575 and 1580 respectively. Elizabeth took advantage of the defeat of the FitzGeralds in Cork and began a plantation in Munster. Promising people the same kind of wealth that people were finding in the Americas, many English came and settled in what had been FitzGerald land. The land was quickly farmed, towns developed and the colony was prospering by 1587. However, the colony was devastated in 1598 by a co-ordinated Irish attack from which it never recovered, although many English remained in isolated areas.

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The Defeat of Ulster and the Ulster Plantation 1598 - 1629:

By 1598, Ulster was the last bastion of pure Celtic life in Ireland. The genetics and culture of most of the rest of Ireland had mingled with Viking, Norman and then English settlers and was a now hybrid containing cultural components of Celtic, Viking, Norman and English origins. Ulster was largely shielded from these changed because a) it was defended by strong clans, particularly the O'Neills in Tir Eoghain. b) it was furthest away from the Norman invasions which took place on the south coast c) it was marshy and thinly-soiled and was regarded as inferior land for conquering.
Around about this time, Hugh O'Neill, the Earl of Tir Eoghain decided that the increased English control of the rest of Ireland was a threat to his Celtic heritage, Brehon laws and Catholic faith. Concerned by the strength of the English, he decided to pre-empt an English attack and attack them first. The English were totally unprepared and found it hard to respond. In successive offensives, they were repelled from Ulster. Eventually the English decided to cut their losses and dug-in around the edges of Ulster. They built a series of forts around the province's southern limits, and this forced the Irish to attack the English forts rather than attack on even terms. This finally gave the English the advantage, but despite this new English tactic, it wasn't until 24 December 1601 at the battle of Kinsale that O'Neill's army was defeated. O'Neill retreated into Tir Eoghain [Tyrone] but did not surrender. Rather than invading Ulster to finish off O'Neill, the English strengthened their forts and started launching commando-raids into Ulster to destroy crops. They hoped to starve O'Neill into submission or into launching an unprepared attack. O'Neill did attack again, but was finally defeated by Lord Mountjoy at Omye [Omagh] in 1602. (Even today a townland near Omagh is called Mountjoy.) In 1603, the O'Neill and the English signed the Treaty of Mellifont which permitted O'Neill to keep his land while adopting English law and shedding his Irish title.

However, the English felt that the Treaty of Mellifont was not enough to keep control of Ulster. They knew that Catholic Spain could supply the Ulstermen with arms to launch an uprising against them. So they decided to plant Ulster with Protestant settlers. However, the lesson of previous plantations had been learned. In the Laois/Offaly plantations and particularly in Munster, the settlers had been badly affected by attacking Irish. So this time the settlers were to live in specially built fortified towns known as Plantation Towns. In 1609 the English mapped out 4,000,000 acres of land and started gaving it out in 1610. Counties Down, Monaghan and Antrim were planted privately. Counties Derry and Armagh were planted with English. Counties Tyrone and Donegal were planted with Scots. Counties Fermanagh and Cavan were planted with both Scots and English.

The vast majority of the settlers were Scottish, as it turned out, and they brought with them a new form of Christianity, Presbyterianism, which was different from both Roman Catholicism and the Church of England, although it is classified as Protestant. They also brought new farming methods and a Puritan lifestyle. This made north-east Ireland culturally very different from the rest of the island. Many native Ulstermen attacked the settlers and burned crops. Some were shipped to the continent. However many native Irish stayed and became employees of the settlers, and the Ulster Plantation became the most successful plantation to date.

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The English Civil War and Cromwell 1629 - 1687:


All through these events the power of the English Parliament was steadily increasing. The Parliament was an elected organisation set up by the King to manage the country as it was becoming too much work for the King. Although officially ruled by the King, Parliament was increasing its power to such an extent that by the 1600s it could no longer be relied upon to do what the King wanted. King Charles 1st first came into conflict with his Parliament in 1629 when he ordered Parliament to raise taxes and it refused. His response was to abolish Parliament and he ruled England on his own for 11 years. However, the people didn't support him and he ran so short of money that he was forced to reinstate Parliament in 1640.
However conflict broke out again in 1642 when Charles tried to arrest 5 members of Parliament who had been actively disagreeing with his policies. The MPs fled into the back streets of London but when the King went after them, the citizens expelled him angrily from their city. This was a direct violation by the people of the supreme power of the King and marked the beginning of the English Civil War.

Those English who supported the King (the Cavaliers) had support in north England and Wales and the Parliamentarians (Roundheads) had support in the rest of England. Despite the fairly even start, however, the Cavaliers were fought back and in 1646 the Roundheads forced the King to surrender. However, at the ceasefire negotiatons Charles would not agree to the Roundhead terms and after a stalemate the war erupted again in 1648. Once again the Cavaliers were defeated but this time the Roundheads did not accept a surrender and instead captured and executed Charles in 1649. Thus England found itself with no King. For the next 11 years England was a Republic of sorts. It was ruled from 1653 to 1658 by a general named Oliver Cromwell, who was was a fundamental Protestant but an extremely cruel man. He was given the title 'Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England', but he had been active in Ireland long before he undertook that role:

In 1641, just prior to the Civil War, the Irish of Ulster had begun an uprising and attacked the planters who had been settled 30 years before. Between 10,000 and 15,000 Protestant planters were murdered by the Irish at places such as Portadown. Due to the war, the English did nothing about this and the death-toll became heavily exaggerated over time. In 1649, after the Civil War had ended, Cromwell landed at Dublin with 12,000 men with the intention of punishing those who had uprisen. He first attacked Drogheda and captured it, killing over 3000 people. He then marched on Wexford town and massacred several hundred people there. The surrounding towns of Cork, Bandon, Kinsale and Youghal surrendered. Cromwell left Ireland in 1650 having dealt a severe blow to the uprising Irish.

A problem of equal concern to Cromwell after the Civil War, however, was the fact that most of the soldiers in the Roundhead army still needed paid for their time served in the Civil War, but Parliament had no money to give them. So Cromwell decided to pay them in land. He forcibly moved thousands of Irish from their homes in Munster and Leinster and resettled them in counties Clare, Galway, Mayo and Roscommon. This was by far the poorest land in Ireland and, as well as this, they were not allowed to live within 3 miles of the coast. This strip, called the 'Mile Line' was given to Cromwell’s soldiers. In 1652 the newly cleared land in Munster and Leinster was given to Protestants in what was called the 'Cromwellian Settlement'. There was now no part of Ireland where Catholics owned more than ½ of the land. The main reason for this was Cromwell's belief in fundamental Protestantism and hatred of Catholicism. He claimed to be acting on God's behalf and expelled about 1000 Catholic priests from Ireland.

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James 2nd and William of Orange1687 - 1691:

In 1688 a Europe-wide war broke out after simmering international relations boiled over. On one side was France, and on the other was the Grand Alliance. The Grand Alliance consisted of Spain, Holland, Germany, Hungary, Naples, Prussia and Sweden. The Grand Alliance's commander was William of Orange, a Protestant from an estate in the "Orange" region of Holland.
At the same time as this war was breaking out, the English King, Charles 2nd, was succeeded by King James 2nd. James was a Catholic and introduced laws for religious toleration of non-Anglicans (i.e. Catholics and Presbyterians). However, when James began promoting Catholics up to the higher ranks of the army, Parliament became suspicious that he was trying to make England an officially Catholic country again. To complicate matters, James' daughter, Mary, married William of Orange and thus William became heir to the throne.

In 1687, James made his brother-in-law his viceroy in Ireland. The viceroy strengthened the Irish army in case James needed it. Because James was a Catholic, it was easy to find recruits in Ireland. However, when the viceroy tried to garrison some of the Catholic troops in Derry in 1688, the Protestant citizens did not want them to enter. Nobody was brave enough to go and tell the troops they were not welcome, however, and eventually it was the young apprentice boys of Derry who shut the city gates as the troops tried to enter. This was repeated in Enniskillen, in Co Fermanagh. It is these events that today's Apprentice Boys commemorate.

Things changed for the worse in 1688 when James had another son. However, while James regarded this Catholic boy as his heir, Parliament regarded Protestant William as heir. Scared that James would take action to prevent William becoming King, Parliament invited William over to take over the monarchy there and then, and William duly arrived in November 1688 with his troops and marched to London. James fled to France and William and Mary were made King and Queen in 1689. This coronation is called the 'Glorious Revolution'. The Protestants in Ireland joined the revolution and declared their support for William.

In March 1689, James landed in Ireland at Dublin to start his fight-back, because he knew he would get strong Catholic support there. Many Protestants, in support of William, took up arms and attacked James' new army. However James was stronger than the natives and drove them back and sieged them in the cities of Derry and Enniskillen, with the aim of crushing all Williamite support in Ireland. James placed a boom across the Foyle River so Derry was without food supplies for 105 days. The situation got so desperate that astronomical prices were being paid in the city for things like a single rat. The siege of Derry is another of the famous events of Irish history. The siege was finally lifted when a Williamite ship, the Mountjoy, arrived and smashed through the boom on 28 July 1689 and James fled. James’ soldiers who had been sieging Enniskillen were intercepted and defeated at Newtownbutler, Co Fermanagh. In August 1689, William’s armies landed at, and took, the town of Carrickfergus in Co Antrim.

In March 1690, 4000 Grand Alliance troops (Danes, in fact) arrived at Belfast to aid William, because they wanted William to get back to leading the war in Europe. At the same time, Louis 16th of France sent troops to aid James. He wanted to prolong the war in Ireland, so that William's attention would be diverted away from France for longer. In June 1690, William himself arrived at Carrickfergus and marched south. James marched north from Dublin and the two armies met at the River Boyne, in Co Meath on 1 July, 1690. The ensuing battle, known as the Battle of the Boyne, is arguably the most famous event in Irish history, due to its symbolic Catholic/Protestant confrontation.

In the event, William won the battle losing 400 men to James' 1,300. James immediately left for Dublin and subsequently fled to France. William's victory was celebrated right across Europe as it represented a defeat by the Grand Alliance over France. James' viceroy remained and led the remains of James' army to Limerick and Athlone. He managed to inflict several defeats on William's army, and William failed to take Limerick despite sieging it. William returned to England leaving his general Ginkel in charge. Ginkel offered the Jacobites (supporters of James) a peace settlement, but they refused and decided to fight on under the leadership of the Marquis St Ruth. On 12 July, 1691 the two armies met at Aughrim, near Athlone. Ginkel decided to attack despite being in an inferior strategic position. However, he won and St Ruth was killed and the Jacobites retreated in disarray to Limerick. On 26 September 1691, the Jacobites finally surrendered and a peace treaty was signed in October 1691. This was the Treaty of Limerick which permitted Catholics to retain the right to practice their religion, but forfeit their land. Most of the Jacobite soldiers were allowed free passage to go to France to fight for Louis, and were known as the 'Wild Geese'.

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Segregation and the Industrial Revolution 1691 - 1789:

After the Treaty of Limerick, a series of Penal Laws were passed by the Irish Parliament whose expressed purpose was to try to rid Ireland of Catholicism, by forcing Catholics to become Protestant. These laws banned Catholics from a) having a gun b) being professionals (except medical) c) being involved in politics d) owning land e) receiving education (except for that in the Protestant faith) f) owning a horse over £5 value.
These laws were so harsh that many Irish converted to Anglicanism, if only to escape the penalties that were incurred by those who broke the Penal Laws. In 1728 another law was passed which banned Catholics from voting. Another law introduced was that if a man converted to Protestantism then he would be given his Catholic father's estate, even if the father was still alive. As you can imagine, this produced a lot of ill feeling within families.

Catholics were not the only group to be discriminated against. In 1704 a law was passed which banned Presbterians from town councils and other official positions. Presbyterian ministers were also banned from conducting wedding ceremonies.

In 1713, France made peace with England by the Treaty of Utrecht, thus ending the war in Europe, finally ending a war that had dragged on for a quarter of a century. Being an island nation, England had had to develop a huge navy in order to defend its shores. This navy was put to use during the years of Colonisation, when all the European powers joined in the mad scramble for territory abroad, especially Asia, Africa, the Americas and Australasia. having already amassed a large navy, England was at an advantage from the start.

Throughout the 18th century, England made spectacular conquests around the world, namely in India, southern Africa, Australia and North America. This was the dawn of the golden era of the British empire. In 1776, however, England went to war when the residents of their colonies in New England, (on the east coast of North America) declared themselves independent. Despite fighting a war, England lost control of its New England colonies in 1777. And 12 years later, in 1789, the French monarchy was overthrown in the French Revolution. The King of France was beheaded in a spectacular finale of the rise of the Republic over the Monarchy.

Towards the end of the century, which was relatively peaceful in Ireland despite the discrimination, England became the first country in the world to hit the Industrial Revolution. Soon factories were springing up in Dublin, Cork and Belfast and the cities were soon swelling with new residents. The population rose and many large buildings were constructed including magnificent churches.

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The United Irishmen and the 1798 Rebellion 1789 - 1800:

In 1789 the French Revolution occurred during which French peasants overthrew the monarchy. Out of the bloodshed emerged a new democratic French republic. For many peasant people across Europe, this new democracy concept was very appealing, since it gave the power to them and not to the aristocracy. In 1791, the newly installed French government offered military assistance to any group who wanted to overthrow their own King. This was very worrying for the surrounding monarchies of England, Spain, Germany and Austria and war soon broke out between them and France.
At the same time, a new organisation was formed in Ireland. Under Wolfe Tone, the United Irishmen (who consisted of Protestants and Catholics alike) declared their belief in a peaceful future for Ireland in which Protestants and Catholics could live together in peace and with equality. They wanted to set up a French-styled democratic republic in Ireland, which was independent of Britain. They quickly gained support, although some, most notably the newly-formed Orange Order which was set up to preserve loyalty to the monarchy, were against them.

Supporting French Republicanism was seen as treasonous by the British considering they were at war with France. Also, Britain was a constitutional monarchy, which meant that the King did not have absolute power. Therefore the British regarded themselves as already democratic. Because of these facts, the British saw the United Irishmen as a national threat to be disposed of.

In 1798, the British began attacking known United Irishmen, and murdering large numbers of Protestant and Catholic members. Tone realised that if they were going to have their rebellion, it would have to be now or never, before the British destroyed them. So a large rebellion began in the spring concentrated in counties Down, Antrim and Wexford. Several bloody battles took place at Antrim, Ballynahinch and Saintfield. The United Irishmen were finally defeated at the Battle of Vinegar Hill in County Wexford. Almost all the several hundred United Irishmen were slaughtered.

However, it was not over. In late 1798, the French sent reinforcements to Ireland and they landed at Mayo, in western Ireland. They invaded and took over the area and gained popular support among the local Irish who saw it as an opportunity to get a better government. The French and their Irish allies got as far as county Sligo before being defeated by the British. While the French were taken prisoner, the local Irish were massacred as a punishment for treason. Wolfe Tone committed suicide in prison whilst awaiting execution. Note that this was the last time a hostile army ever invaded Ireland.

Although the rebellion had been put down, it was clear that Republicanism in Ireland could not be ignored and serious changes were needed in the way Ireland was governed to ensure that such violence did not occur again.

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The Act of Union, Emancipation and the Great Famine 1800 - 1877:

The drastic action that was taken was the Act of Union, passed in 1800. It formed a new country ("The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland") by uniting England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. A new flag - the Union Jack - was created for it which had components from the flags of each member state. All regional parliaments were abolished, and instead the entire UK was to be ruled from a centralised London parliament. For most Irish, there wasn't a noticeable difference, but it meant the Irish government representatives could not pass laws on their own.
In 1813, a man named Sir Robert Peel set up a law-enforcing force in Ireland. Its job was to arrest those who broke the law and generally manage crime prevention. This force was known as the 'Peelers' or the 'Bobbies', and later became known as the Police. It was the world's first Police force and, by 1822, most countries has followed suit and set up their own.

The hated penal laws were still in force in Ireland in the early 1800s. These discriminated against non-Anglicans, principally Catholics and Presbyterians. It had been promised that they would be abolished with the Act of Union. However, this did not happen and it took the actions of Daniel O'Connell to lead a campaign for emancipation that captured the English public's imagination and led to the necessary legislation being passed in 1829. The importance of emancipation to the Irish people was recognised when the main street in Dublin was re-named after O'Connell after independence in 1921.

In 1800 the population of Ireland was between 4 and 5 million, with 200,000 in Dublin. However the Industrial revolution and especially the Irish Linen industry expanded explosively in the first half of the century, and this allowed the population to increase dramatically. By 1841, there were 8,175,000 people in Ireland. (This compares to the 1996 figure of 5,162,535.) Most Irish landlords were Protestants, simply because the law forbade Catholics from owning land. The Irish peasants themselves, who were both Protestant and Catholic, ate potatoes almost exclusively, since land was scarce and potatoes were an intensive crop. However, in 1845 a fungal disease called 'phytophthora infestans', or 'potato blight' struck and wiped out a third of the potato crop in Ireland. This was a disaster to the peasants who relied upon it. Those who lived near towns were better off, since towns had other sources of food, but things got very bad for those living in rural areas.

By 1846, potato supplies had sold out and many people began to slowly starve. The British government stepped in and imported £100,000 worth of maize from America to feed the starving, and this helped prevent mass death for the first year of the Famine. However, the crop of 1846 also failed and this time wiped out almost all the potatoes in Ireland. Thousands of people simply starved, particularly in rural areas. Many also died from typhus, scurvy and dysentery. The British set up soup-kitchens and workhouses for the poor but they drastically underestimated the scale of the disaster, and many people did not receive any aid at all. The problem was compounded by landlords who evicted Peasants who could not pay the rent because they had no potatoes to sell. Fortunately the crop of 1847 was good, and, although the 1848 crop failed, the starvation was never so bad as in 1846. (Note: This site contains a dedicated Famine section for those who are seeking more information).

Many thousands of Irish decided to cut their losses and set sail on emigration boats to America. This is the origin of about half of what is now referred to as 'Irish America'. Hundreds of Irish died on the ships which were so overcrowded that they became known as 'coffin ships'. By 1851, the population had fallen 25% to 6,000,000 and the emigration continued until around 1900, by which time only 4,500,000 Irish remained in Ireland. This left huge chunks of abandoned farmland and even today, large areas of derelict farmland can be seen in Mayo and Galway. Many Irish felt that the British could have done more and this caused a lot of anti-British sentiment to arise, particularly in Ireland and among the Irish who had gone to America.

While there is little doubt that the British could have done more to prevent the mass deaths in Ireland, some blame must also be attributed to the over-reliance of the rural Irish on a single food crop and on the lack of communication routes with England, meaning that many in Britain were genuinely unaware of what was happening in rural Ireland. Most visitors to Ireland stayed in the cities, which were largely unaffected by the famine.

In 1858 a new group calling themselves the Irish Republican Brotherhood or the 'Fenians' was formed with the aim of creating an independent Irish republic by force. Unlike previous groups, the IRB had a large support base, particularly from the Irish who had gone to America. In 1867 they staged an uprising but it was easily defeated by the British. The Fenians went into the background for the next 30 years, but it still existed. The IRB was the first group to add a religious (pro-Catholic/anti-Protestant) slant to Republicanism, and this widened the gap between the 2 religious groups who shared Ireland.

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The Land League, Home Rule and Unionism 1877 - 1886:

After the Famine, the price of food rose rapidly and Irish farmers began to get better off as they made money on this market. In response, the Irish landlords raised taxes. However, after 1876, the food-bubble burst and many farmers fell on hard times. Despite this, as well as poor harvests in 1877-1879, the landlords did not reduce the taxes. Many farmers found they could not pay their rent and were evicted from their cottages and land. Many of these evicted farmers, who were now homeless, formed a new land-reform movement headed by Michael Davitt, a farmer from Mayo. They wanted to change the law to reduce the power of landlords and allow peasants to own their land.
At the same time another man, Isaac Butt, had started the Home Rule Party. The aim of this party was to repeal the Act of Union and reinstate Ireland's Parliament. He wanted a regional Irish Parliament that could pass laws separately from the main Parliament in London, but did not want complete Independence from Britain. This was viewed by some as a perfect in-between solution for Ireland. In 1874, the Home Rule Party won 59 seats in Parliament. In 1879, Charles Stewart Parnell, had become the leader. His problem was apathy - most Irish didn't really care about regaining their own Parliament.

However, his fortune changed when Davitt invited Parnell to speak out against evictions and to call for an increase in peasant land rights. He got massive support, and by merging the Home Rule and Land campaigns, he had boosted his own cause as well. In 1879, the Land League was formed and Parnell became its President. Its aims were to get more rights for tenant farmers and reduce evictions. He also believed that an Nation could be forged out of the people living in Ireland. This belief was called 'Irish Nationalism', (which is today often confused with Irish Republicanism, which is a belief in making Ireland an independent republic).

The first tactic by the Land League was to boycott any peasant who moved into a farm where the previous farmer had been evicted. This was designed to force the new peasant to leave, so that the landlord would get no rent. However, between 1879 and 1882, the violence from these boycotts got so bad that it became known as the Land War. The Parliament tried to solve the problem in 1881 by passing the Land act. This set up fair rates of rent, and many Irish farmers saw their rent reduced by 20%. However, it did not help many of the poorest farmers, so the violence continued.

There were now several groups in Ireland. The Home Rulers wanted the Act of Union repealed and Ireland given back its own Parliament, but not made an independent country. Against the Home Rule movement were those who felt that the Act of Union was good for Ireland and wanted to retain it. These were called the 'Irish Unionists'. They were mostly wealthy Protestants, because Catholics had not recovered from the years of segregation that had gone before. Against the Unionists were those who felt that Ireland could be made into a self-governing nation. These were called the 'Irish Nationalists'. The Nationalists had to tackle several problems because some aspects of what constituted a nation (a unique and widely spoken language and a common religion) were missing. Irish was only spoken in small areas and the Irish were both Protestant and Catholic. The final group was those who wanted to create a self-governing republic in Ireland. These were called the 'Irish Republicans'. They differed from Nationalists in that they wanted an independent country above anything else. Nationalists were more interested in nationhood on the island, and did not place as much emphasis on independence.

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The First and Second Home Rule Bills, 1886 - 1893:

In 1886, the Liberal Party Prime Minister of the UK, William Gladstone, decided that in order to end the problems in Ireland, some action would have to be taken. He felt that giving Ireland back their local Parliament, which was removed in the Act of Union of 1800, would solve the problem. So in 1886, Gladstone introduced the First Home Rule Bill. However it was defeated in the London Parliament because others, especially, the Conservative Party were against Home Rule which they thought would weaken the United Kingdom.
After this attempt to introduce Home Rule, the Irish Unionists formed an organisation called the 'Irish Unionist Alliance' to fight Home Rule. This organisation was very influential, despite being small in numbers, and received large donations from rich businessmen in Dublin, Cork and Belfast. These were the people who stood to lose most from Home Rule. The IUA also gained support with the opposition in the UK Parliament (the Conservatives) because they felt that if Ireland broke away from the UK, other parts of the British Empire would try to as well. These people were called the 'British Unionists'. This meant that the two sides in the London Parliament were against each other when it came to the issue of Home Rule.

After the First Home Rule Bill had failed, the Conservative leader had come to Ulster, where Irish Unionism was significantly stronger than anywhere else. He told the Unionists that they could count on British Unionists to help them resist Home Rule. He famously commented that 'Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right'. In 1892, the Unionists started to use the slogan 'Erin go bragh' which is Irish for 'Ireland for ever' to show their commitment to maintaining Ireland's position as a part of the UK. There was also some sporadic rioting in Belfast, because the Unionists in Ulster had begun to be regarded as anti-Catholic. This was a charge they didn't face in the rest of Ireland, where there was less trouble. In 1886 alone, 50 people were killed in the city of Belfast.

In 1884, the Irish Nationalists began the first phase of forging a single Irish national identity. This started with the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) to promote Irish sports. In 1893, the Gaelic League was founded by two (Nationalist) Protestants. Its purpose was to promote the Irish language. The Irish language was mainly of Celtic origin with some Scottish influence. Both organisations were extremely successful, attracting thousands of members. Together, they instituted what is now referred to as the 'Gaelic Revival' in Ireland.

In 1886, the anti-Home-Rule Conservatives came to power. Their policy was to introduce new and fairer laws for Ireland. These laws, called the 'Plan of Campaign', gave more rights to tenant farmers and helped them to become financially much better off . The purpose of this policy was to show the Irish, by kindness, that Home Rule was unnecessary. It worked well, and between 1885 and 1905, most of Ireland's land changed hands from the landlords to the tenant farmers.

In 1892, the Liberals regained power. Despite threats from the Unionists at their 1892 conference, William Gladstone introduced the Second Home Rule Bill in 1893. In a victorious vote, it was passed by the House of Commons. However it was defeated in the UK's upper house (the House of Lords), where there were many more Conservatives than Liberals. A Bill can't become law in the UK unless both houses pass it.

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The Third Home Rule Bill and Ulster's Opposition, 1893 - 1914:

In 1900, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (the 'Fenians' or IRB) began to regroup: they had been doing very little since their failed rebellion of 1867. They were a group of hard-line Irish Republicans who began to recruit volunteers for a future rebellion against British Rule. In 1905 a Dubliner named Arthur Griffith set up a new political party, called Sinn Féin. It was a Republican party and was vehemently against Home Rule, which it regarded as falling too short of what was needed. It supported a completely independent republic consisting of the whole island of Ireland.
In the 1909 General Election, there was a hung Parliament when the Liberals and the Conservatives both won exactly 272 seats. For John Redmond, the leader of the 84-seat Home Rule Party, this was an ideal situation to get what he wanted - both sides needed the support of his party to form a government, so he could ask for almost anything he wanted. The way things were at the time, the only way the Hung Parliament situation could be resolved was if the power of the House of Lords was reduced. The Liberals introduced the Parliament Act to make this change, but they needed more than 272 votes to ensure that it was passed. Redmond agreed to support the Liberal's Parliament Act in return for another Home Rule Bill. The Act was duly passed, and the House of Lords' powers were reduced.

The Liberals were now obligated to introduce the Third Home Rule Bill, in 1912. They were more reluctant than they had been in the past, but the Conservatives had more Unionist support than ever before. When the Bill was discussed, the Conservatives fiercely campaigned to have the Unionist north east of Ireland treated separately from the rest of the island. They argued that the Protestants of Ulster constituted a separate Irish nation. They hoped this argument would stop Home Rule being introduced, since it would, they believed, result in a volatile Ireland containing two national identities. The two prime Unionist speakers were Sir Edward Carson (leader of the Unionists) and Sir James Craig.

In Belfast, tensions were so high over the Bill that spontaneous rioting kept breaking out between the Catholic and Protestant residents of the City. On 28 September 1912, Craig introduced the 'Ulster Covenant', which people could sign to pledge their determination to defeat the Third Home Rule Bill. It was a huge success and 450,000 Irish people signed it, some in their own blood. The week came to a climax on 28 September 1912, which was known as Ulster Day. The whole event was remarkably peaceful, considering the tension, and received huge publicity in Britain.

As the Bill was discussed, one proposition put forward was that the 4 counties with a Unionist majority (Antrim, Down, Londonderry and Armagh) could be left out of the Home Rule scheme. This was proposed as a compromise, since both sides were threatening to use force if the other got their way. At first the Unionists were horrified, since it made Home Rule much more likely, but they quickly resigned themselves to the idea. Many of them decided they would need a back up military force as 'insurance' to make certain that at least Ulster was left out of Home Rule. So in January 1913, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) was set up. Thousands of Unionists joined, and they met in Orange Halls around Ulster. The only thing missing was weapons. On 24/25 April 1914, 25,000 rifles and 3,000,000 bullets were illegally landed by the UVF at Larne, Bangor and Donaghadee, all near Belfast. Since the police in these areas did not try to stop the landings, the Nationalists felt that the police were in league with the UVF.

By the end of 1913 (the Bill was still being debated) the Nationalists realised that the Liberal government was likely to agree with the Conservatives and leave part of Ulster out of Home Rule. They were horrified, as they felt an Irish nation could only be forged with the whole island included in Home Rule. So some of them set up their own military force, the Irish Volunteer Force (IVF) in November 1913. It recruited even more men than the UVF. Since many Nationalists felt that the Home Rule leader, John Redmond, was ready to compromise Ireland, Redmond was frightened by the size of the IVF. The IVF landed 1,500 rifles and 45,000 bullets at Howth, near Dublin, on 26 July 1914. In this case, the police did intervene and shot 3 people dead. It looked as if the police were treating the UVF and IVF very differently.

In March 1914, the government introduced a new scheme, which it hoped would prevent a Civil War between the UVF and IVF. This was called the 'County Option Scheme', under which each county in Ireland would vote whether or not to join Home Rule. If it said No then it would be outside Home Rule for 6 years. Under this, the 4 eastern counties in Ulster (Antrim, Armagh, Down and Londonderry) would be out of Home Rule. But the Unionists felt that if the dug in their heels, they could get counties Tyrone and Fermanagh out of Home Rule too, even though they had a slim Nationalist majority (about 56%).