The Making of Ireland

From Ancient Times to the Present

James Lydon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134981502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Making of Ireland by James Lydon provides an accessible history of Ireland from the earliest times. James Lydon recounts, in colourful detail, the waves of settlers, missionaries and invaders which have come to Ireland since pre-history and offers a long perspective on Irish history right up to the present time.

This comprehensive survey includes discussion of the arrival of St. Patrick in the fifth century and Henry II in the twelfth, as well as that of numerous soldiers, traders and craftsmen through the ages. The author explores how these settlers have shaped the political and cultural climate of Ireland today. James Lydon charts the changing racial mix of Ireland through the ages which shaped the Irish nation. The author also follows Ireland's long and troubled entanglement with England from its beginning many centuries ago.

The Making of Ireland offers a complete history in one volume. Through a predominantly political narrative, James Lydon provides a coherent and readable introduction to this vital complex history.

1Saints and Scholars

Early Christian Ireland

The story of the Irish people begins about ten thousand years ago when the first men arrived from Europe to what was then probably already an island. These wanderers from middle Europe were nomadic hunters, using flint for their arrows and knives. In their search for food they gradually spread to different parts of the island, living from hand to mouth along the coast, by rivers and lakes, competing with animals for the food needed to sustain life. These hunters have left little trace other than the primitive flint instruments they used. Slowly they formed settled communities, living in circular huts made of saplings. During the millennia that followed, other men came to Ireland, who knew how to domesticate the animals needed for food and, more importantly, how to grow crops to add to their diet. New settled communities appeared, more permanent houses, burial places and religious sites. In many parts of Ireland megalithic tombs built of stone still survive, representing at once the graveyards of these distant stone-age people and their places of worship. In the Boyne valley the largest of them, elaborate in scale and plan, show evidence of a considerable technology, a delicate sense of design in the decoration widely employed and a sophisticated knowledge of measurement, all of which argues for an advanced civilization. The very size of some of them suggests a density of population and a developed social system capable of building such monuments.

By the time the great monument at Newgrange came to be constructed, in around 2500 BC, the people were growing wheat, as pollen analysis of turves on the mound has shown. But the Newgrange monument also shows that these people possessed an astonishing skill in engineering, sophisticated enough to manipulate huge masses of stone and to align the tomb so that the first rays of the sun on the morning of the winter solstice will shine through a special slit in the roof, along a passage for more than 60 feet, to focus on the most sacred spot at the heart of the mound, where no one would ever see it once the entrance was sealed and concealed. At the very depth of winter, when the dark was at its strongest, they captured and celebrated light. And where they thought no human eye would ever penetrate, they decorated the great stones of the tomb with abstract designs which can still set the imagination alight. While we may wonder at the religious impulse which drove the people to construct such massive monuments as Newgrange, they demonstrate the existence of large, settled communities with the necessary resources and leadership to provide and organize the considerable labour forces required for the construction over long periods of time and for the carriage of huge stones, often from long distances away. Wherever we find such clusters of different kinds of tombs, in many parts of Ireland, we have evidence of settlement, civilization and prosperity.

The tribes which settled down necessarily developed appropriate religious and secular institutions to govern their lives. But of these we know little, except what can be gleaned from much later, and suspect, literary sources. They practised agriculture and they developed technical skills of a high order which enabled them to work in gold, silver, bronze, and eventually iron. They perfected the art of pottery and became adept at the difficult medium of ceramics. They clearly had a keen sense of beauty which impelled them to produce artefacts which were purely ornamental in purpose, and possessed a sure sense of design. All of this argues for a high level of civilization, so that it is remarkable that they did not develop an alphabet for writing (apart from the crude ogham alphabet which was used for inscriptions on stone and possibly wood). It must be presumed that this was deliberate. The succeeding invasions and settlements of Celtic tribes continued to bring new skills and knowledge, but never the art of writing. The last to come, the Goidels, who imposed their own Gaelic culture over the island, produced a rich oral literature which, to judge from its later written forms, was derived from the common stock of heroic and mythical traditions which was shared by the Indo-European world. They also developed a complex and sophisticated legal system, preserved in a body of laws which was passed on orally through generations of the legal caste which was its custodian. Inaugural rites for the sacral kings, the privileges and obligations of the warrior aristocracy, the historical lore of sacred places, and the genealogies of kings were never committed to writing, but were handed on orally. While the rest of the civilized world was committing history, laws and literature to writing, Ireland was left without letters.

This suggests isolation from the world which Rome had conquered. But there is plenty of evidence to show that this was not the case. Trading links had long been established. Men from Ireland served with Roman legions. Others had gone raiding deep into Roman Britain and some were even to found colonies there. It was not isolation which made Ireland go her own way, but conservatism. By the time of the Christian era Gaelic Ireland had fossilized. What caused this situation to change radically was the arrival of Christianity, sufficiently strong in the island by 431 for the pope of the day to take notice and send a bishop. Christianity was not only to challenge the priestly caste with their mysteries, it offered new ideas which were to bring Europe into Ireland and eventually revolutionize existing institutions. This was a long process over many generations, sometimes requiring renewal from Europe in the future. But from the fifth century, when that process began, a new Ireland emerged.

We will never know when exactly the first Christians came to Ireland. The message of Christ may have been carried by traders, it may even have been brought by unremembered missionaries or brought home by Irishmen who had been converted in Europe. What is certain is that by the first quarter of the fifth century a flourishing Christian community was established in one part of the island. Prosper of Aquitaine, who wrote a chronicle in Rome in which he recounted events to which he was a witness, recorded that in 431 Pope Celestine sent Palladius as ‘the first bishop to the Irish believing in Christ’. Not only is this the first authentic date in Irish history, it is a genuine record of the first Irish bishop. What became of Palladius is not known. It was not he who was subsequently remembered in Irish tradition as the first bishop but Patrick, regarded as the Apostle of Ireland and now the national saint. Traditionally said to have arrived in 432 and single-handedly to have converted the Irish before his death in 461, this Patrick and his mission may well be an amalgam of different evangelizers. But there is no doubting the authenticity of Patrick the Briton who worked in Ireland, probably in the mid-fifth century, and founded a church from which all modern Irish Christians claim descent. He left us a very precious record in his own words, now known as his Confession, with a letter which he wrote to a British chieftain named Coroticus, and possibly even some sayings which were carefully cherished and later written down in the great manuscript which we now know as the Book of Armagh, believed for centuries to be in the saint’s own hand and therefore a very precious relic carefully preserved. From these, and from a cautious use of later literary sources, it is possible to reconstruct an outline of his achievement in Ireland and the legacy which he left after his death.

He was born, he tells us, in the west of Romanized Britain. His father, who was a deacon, had a small estate from which Patrick was captured by Irish raiders when he was 16. Taken as a slave to Ireland he spent six years there as a herd. During that time in captivity he rediscovered the lost faith of his childhood, when, as he says, God came ‘and the Spirit was fervent in me’. One night in a dream a voice, which was to come to him again in later life and bring him back to Ireland, told him that a ship was ready to carry him to freedom. Patrick left his master, travelled 200 miles through unknown country, managed to get on board a ship, sailed for three days and, after landing, wandered with the pagan crew for another 28 days through a deserted country. During all that time God protected him and the pagans, once again confirming the trust of Patrick.

Eventually he made his way home to Britain and rejoined his family. But one night he had a dream in which he received a letter from a messenger from Ireland and on opening the letter he found that it was addressed to him by ‘The Voice of the Irish’. As he read he imagined that he heard the voice of those who lived beside ‘the forest of Foclut which is near the western sea’, crying out to him, as though with one voice: ‘We beg you, holy boy, to come and walk among us again’. The dreams continued, giving him no peace until he decided to return to Ireland.

Patrick insisted that he was a rustic, uneducated man, only fitted to be a bishop among the Irish because he was called there by God. This lack of learning, which may mean that contrary to later tradition he never studied in Gaul, was the cause of opposition to his mission in Britain, together with some unknown sin of his youth which seems to have indicated that he was unfit to be a bishop. It was in reply to such criticism that he finally wrote his Confession and justified his work as bishop on the ground that he was made one by God and that he was blessed with success. He wrote that he had preached the gospel ‘to the point beyond which there is no-one’ and described how he ‘baptised so many thousands’ and ordained clergy everywhere ‘to serve a people just now coming to the faith’. He asked his critics to explain how it was that in Ireland ‘those who never had any knowledge of God but up till now always worshipped idols and abominations’ are now called by all ‘the people of the lord and the sons of God’; furthermore, why was it that so many sons and daughters of Irish kings ‘are seen to be monks and virgins of Christ?’. Clearly this must be the work of God.

But it was not achieved without great hardship and dangers. Like St Paul before him, Patrick was often persecuted and then saved by God. Yet undaunted by the many dangers which beset him he travelled to the most remote districts ‘where no-one had ever penetrated to baptise or ordain clergy or confirm the people’, for the salvation of the Irish. Through it he suffered acute loneliness, longing to see his homeland and his family, living ‘among barbarous peoples, a stranger and an exile for the love of God’. If Patrick here emphasizes the loneliness of the exile, and thus gives first utterance to a cry which was constantly to be repeated in the future in the literature of Irish exile, and in particular missionary exile, he also admitted in a phrase in his letter to Coroticus that he now regarded Ireland as another homeland. ‘We are Irish’, he wrote.

None of this tells us much about the actual achievement of Patrick in Ireland. Both the Confession and the letter provide a rare insight into the mind and heart of a great European of the fifth century. We can reach back through the generations to the man. But apart from this, we learn little about the details of his life in Ireland or the character of the Christian church there. The obscurities and difficulties have given rise to what has been one of the most controversial problems in Irish historiography. But there is now general agreement that Patrick’s mission was largely confined to the northern half of the island. Other missionaries, including perhaps Palladius, had been busy in the south. Leinster and Munster preserve some traditions of pre- Patrician saints. This rough division of Ireland into two separate areas of missionary activity not only mirrored the old division of Ireland into two halves, Leth Chuinn (‘Conn’s half’) and Leth Mugha (‘Mug’s half’), north and south, but was also to be reflected in later ecclesiastical controversy between Armagh and Kildare.

Despite his claim to have baptized thousands and to have spread Christianity widely, Patrick does admit that he also met with stern resistance. He seems to have been forced to conform to the social habits of the island, moving constantly from place to place with an entourage of young aristocrats and distributing gifts like any high-born nobleman. It was inevitable that in a society which lacked towns and the kind of centralized institutions on which Christian ecclesiastical organization was based, Patrick should find it nearly impossible to give his church an orthodox structure. He had to try, since it was the only structure he knew, and it made the process of conversion difficult and slow. The idea that the whole, or even the greater part of Ireland was converted by the time Patrick died is an invention of later hagiography designed to give Patrick heroic as well as saintly status. The group of late sixth century canons, ecclesiastical legislation later attributed to Patrick, Auxilius and Iserninus, show clearly that Ireland was still largely pagan. They also reveal a church organized as was the church elsewhere in Europe, ruled by bishops, each of whom was the authority in his own paruchia or diocese. Monasticism, with abbots, had its place in this organization, but it was still a subsidiary one.

This kind of church fitted uneasily into the Irish society of the fifth century. That society has been described, in a phrase which has become classical, as ‘tribal, rural, hierarchical and familiar’. The whole of Ireland was divided into a large number of autonomous tuatha (literally ‘peoples’), small communities with a rí (‘king’). The king was elected from the royal lineage, chosen on the basis of his fitness to rule. He must be without serious physical blemish, a warrior capable of leading his people into battle, and pleasing enough to the local deity so that the land would be fruitful during his reign. The sacral nature of his kingship was symbolized at his inauguration by his solemn marriage to the goddess of his land, a custom which was so important that it survived the influence of Christianity until much later in the middle ages. For the new religion to gain even a foothold it would first of all have to overcome this pagan prop of kingship and gain the king himself.

The king was severely restricted by all sorts of taboos. For the most part he could not interfere with the affairs of a neighbouring tuath, even where he was able to exercise some kind of personal lordship over its king. This meant that Christianity had to expand from tuath to tuath. There could be no sudden, miraculous conversion of the island by the winning over of a great king. The church was based on the tuatha, so that the dioceses of the first bishops had to be coterminous with those basic political units. Because there was no urban or even nucleated centre of population within each tuath, since the people lived in scattered farmsteads represented today by thousands of surviving earthworks or raths, there was no Roman-style centre where the bishop could establish his cathedral and develop the rudiments of a sedentary administration. The bishop, therefore, was an awkward intrusion into the kind of social set-up which was typical of Ireland.

There was another feature which made it difficult for Christianity in its Roman form to be assimilated. Family and kin (fine) were all-important as the property owning unit and the guardian of the legal rights of members. Land could not normally be alienated outside the fine, so that it was impossible to establish and endow a bishopric except within the kin, which was contrary to orthodox Latin practice. The many bishops, therefore, confined within their tuath, must have found it impossible to establish a satisfactory, independent, landed base for their authority, even after they had been given a status at law equal to that of a king. The sixth century canons already referred to indicate something of this. The bishop certainly had authority over all the priests and churches in his diocese and could legislate against outsiders coming in. But the whole tone of the legislation is defensive, betraying a lack of real confidence in the comprehensive authority of the bishop. And while monks were forbidden to baptize or receive alms, the monasteries were already endowed with property through the fine. Bishops could and did acquire property, but only on a restricted basis and with all the limitations imposed by the fine. It was much easier for the fine to endow a monastery and retain rights in the property thereafter. In the course of the sixth century, as the new religion began to spread, wealthy families began to endow monasteries. The Irish church slowly began to assume the strongly monastic character which was to remain its most notable characteristic until the great reforms of the twelfth century.

But in the fifth and sixth centuries there were still forces which were hostile to the reception of Christianity. Ireland had long possessed a learned class which, supported by the old religion, preserved in oral form the traditional and necessary lore handed down through the generations. Their prestige largely depended on this and the druids, poets and lawyers were naturally hostile to the new religion which threatened the very foundations of their place in society. The challenge was later represented in hagiography in such well known pieces as the confrontation of Patrick and the druids on the hill of Tara before the king. But it finds a truer echo in an anonymous poem written in the seventh century, satirizing a priest saying mass. The speaker is supposedly a druid who opposed Patrick:

Across the sea will come Adze-Head,

crazed in the head,

his cloak with hole for the head,

his stick bent in the head.

He will chant impiety

from a table in front of his house;

all his people will answer:

‘Be it thus, Be it thus’.

In time the new religion adapted itself to the peculiarities of Irish society and became popular. The learned classes too, at least outwardly, embraced Christianity. Hostility may have continued, but it was largely hidden. The conversion of the men of learning resulted in a marvellous fusion of Gaelic and Latin cultures which was to make the Irish church unique. There was no rigid separation of the sacred and profane in Ireland as happened elsewhere. It was the monks who wrote down and preserved for posterity the literature of the pagan past, the myths and the heroic tales. It was a great saint, Colum Cille, who was reputed to have defended and saved the filí (‘poets’, ‘seers’) of Ireland at the convention of Druim Ceata in the sixth century. In law the monk scholar was given a high status, equivalent to that held by the file who professed secular learning. The integration of Christianity with society, delayed because of the orthodox structure which the first generation of bishops imposed on the church, eventually produced a real enrichment of the native culture and tradition.

That culture exercised a profound influence on the church in Ireland, not least in making monasticism predominant. Abbots gradually replaced bishops in the hierarchy of authority and monastic filiations (paruchiae) were absorbing the older bishoprics. When and why this should have occurred is a complex matter. But there is no doubt that in the second half of the sixth century, or roughly a century after the traditional date of the Patrician mission, a number of great monasteries were founded which were to establish federations of houses under them. These, unlike the bishoprics, were not confined to one tuath or even one area. The greatest, the paruchia of Colum Cille, based on lona, straddled Scotland, England and Ireland. Others had houses even further away on the mainland of Europe. The monastic paruchia had powers of expansion which no bishop could possibly possess. It was natural, in time, for the bishop to tak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Saints and scholars: Early Christian Ireland
• 2. The Viking impact
• 3. Church reform and political change
• 4. The feudal lordship
• 5. The two nations
• 6. The Geraldine supremacy
• 7. The end of the old order
• 8. A new Ireland
• 9. A Protestant kingdom, 1660–91
• 10. Protestant nationalism and the Anglican ascendancy
• 11. The emergence of Catholic Ireland
• 12. Revolution and emancipation
• 13. The genesis of home rule
• 14. The struggle for independence
• 15. Towards a Republic
• Epilogue: The new Ireland
• Further reading
• Index