FROM EARLY TIMES TO EDWARD I (1272)

Of all histories the history of Ireland is the saddest. For nearly seven centuries it was a course of strife between races, bloodshed, massacre, misgovernment, civil war, oppression, and misery. Hardly even now have the troubles of Ireland come to a close, either for herself or for her partner. Unrest still reigns in her and, embodied in her Parliamentary delegation, harasses the Parliament and distracts the councils of Great Britain.

The theatre of this tragedy is a large island lying beside one nearly three times larger, which cuts it off from the continent of Europe, while on the other side it fronts the wide ocean. The climate is for the most part too wet for wheat. The pasture is very rich. Ireland seems by nature to be a grazing country, and a country of large farms; tillage and small farms have been enforced by the redundance of rural population consequent on the destruction of urban industries. In coal and minerals Ireland is poor, while the sister island abounds in them, and in its swarming factories and mines furnishes a first-rate market for the produce of Irish pastures; so that the two islands are commercial supplements of each other. The progress of pastoral countries, political and general, as they have little city life, is slow. With beauty Ireland is well endowed. The interior is flat, with large peat bogs and brimming rivers. But the coast is mountainous and romantic. The western coast especially, where the Atlantic rolls into deep inlets, has a pensive charm which, when troubles end and settled peace reigns, may attract the villa as they do the wanderer now. In early times the island was densely clothed with woods, which, with the broad and bridgeless rivers, operated like the mountain barriers of the Scottish Highlands in perpetuating the division of clans, with their patriarchal system, their rivalries, and their feuds, thus precluding the growth of a nation. In Ireland there was no natural centre of dominion. Interest of every kind seems to enjoin the union of the islands. But in the age of conquest the weaker island was pretty sure to be marked as a prey of the stronger, while the difficulties of access, the Channel, broad in the days of primitive navigation, and the Welsh mountains, combined with the internal barriers of forest and river and with the naturally wild habits of the people, portended that the conquest would be difficult and that the agony would be long. Such was the mould of Destiny.

The people of Ireland when history opens were Celts, kinsmen of the primitive races of Gaul and Britain, remnants of which are left in Wales and in the Highlands of Scotland. Their language was of that family, while cognate words connect it with the general Aryan stock. There are traces of a succession of immigrations. Too much, no doubt, has been made of the influence of race. Yet the Teuton is a Teuton and the Celt is a Celt. The Celt in his native state has everywhere shown himself lively, social, communicative, impulsive, prone to laughter and to tears, wanting, compared with the Teuton, in depth of character, in steadiness and perseverance. He is inclined rather to personal rule or leadership than to a constitutional polity. His poet is not Shakespeare or Milton, but Tom Moore, a light minstrel of laughter and tears. His political leader is O’Connell, a Boanerges of passionate declamation. In war he is impetuous, as was the Gaul who charged at Allia and the Highlander who charged at Killiecrankie and Prestonpans. His taste as well as his manual skill in decoration is shown by the brilliant collection of gold ornaments in the Celtic Museum at Dublin, as well as in stone carvings and such a paragon of illuminated missals as the Book of Kells. But it is greater than his aptitude for high art, that art which treats the human form, in which he has not shone. His religious tendency, the outcome of his general character, is either to Catholicism with its fervid faith, its mysteries, and its ceremonial, as in Ireland; or to the enthusiastic forms of Protestantism, as in the Highlands and in Wales. Anglicanism, a sober cult with a balanced creed, suits him not. It was a cruel decree of destiny that the larger island from which the conqueror would come was peopled by the Teuton, so that to the usual evils of conquest was added that of a difference of character inherent in race.

The primitive organization of the Irish Celts was tribal, the underlying idea being kinship, real or reputed. The ruler with paternal authority was the chief of the tribe. To avert strife his tanist, or successor, was elected in his lifetime. In a community of reputed kinsmen there could be no aristocracy of birth; but there seems to have been a plutocracy, whose riches in that pastoral country consisted of cattle, which formed the measure of wealth and command of which made poorer clansmen their retainers. Under these were the freemen of the tribe. Under the freemen again were the unfree, wanderers or captives taken in war or slaves from the English slave-market. The unfree appear to have been the only tillers of the soil. Thus tillage was marked with a bar sinister from its birth. The tribal law was a mystical and largely fanciful craft or tradition in the keeping of the Brehons, or judges, a hereditary order who, though revered as arbiters, were without power of enforcing their judgments. Like primitive law in general, it lacked the idea of public wrong. It treated crime as a private injury, to be compounded by fine. The land was the common property of the tribe, to which it nominally reverted on the demise of the holder, though it may be assumed that the chiefs at all events had practically land of their own and that the tendency in this, as in other cases, was to private ownership.

What the religion was is not certainly known. Probably it was the same as that of the Celts of Great Britain and Gaul, Druidism, wild, orgiastic, and perhaps sanguinary. But there seem to be no remains clearly Druidic in Ireland.

Life was pastoral, roving, probably bellicose. It appears that women required to be restrained from taking part in war. The characteristic garb of the tribesman was a loose saffron mantle, which served as his dress by day, his coverlet by night. His favourite weapons, often used, were an axe and a dart. He drew, it seems, a bow weak compared with the long-bow of England. The gentler side of his character was shown in his passionate love of the harp and the reverence in which he held the harper, and which was extended to the bard, whose rude lays saluted the intellectual dawn and whom we find in later times feared as an author of lampoons. Among his favourite amusements was chess.

Knowledge of the peculiar system of the Irish, political and legal, is of more consequence because the opposite system, that of constitutional government and feudal ownership, having presented itself to him as that of alien masters and oppressors, tribal peculiarities and sentiments lingered long. The idea of tribal ownership perhaps was a few generations ago still faintly present in agrarian agitation. Nor has the general character of the tribesman long been, if it yet is, extinct. Tribal feuds were until lately represented in the strange faction fights of the Caravats and Shanavests, the Two-Year-Olds and Three-Year-Olds, the annual fight of factions for a legendary stone, and the encounters between bodies of the peasantry at Irish fairs. Perhaps another feature of character traceable to tribalism may be the gregarious habit of Irishmen contrasted with the Englishman’s isolation and love of his private home.

Connected apparently with the tribal sentiment were the strange customs of fosterage and gossipred. Fosterage consisted in putting out the child to be reared by a tribesman who became its foster-father. Gossipred, a Christian addition, was a spiritual kinship formed at the font. Both relations had extraordinary force.

There were, of course, tribal wars. There were leagues or dominations of powerful tribes which left their traces in the division of the island into four or five provinces, once petty kingships. There was a supreme kingship, the seat of which, sacred in Irish tradition and legend, was the Hill of Tara; but it was probably only when common danger compelled a union of forces that this kingship became a real power. The features of the country, combined with the character of the tribal organization based on kinship, not on citizenship, would prolong the tribal divisions and prevent union. Nor had nature anywhere fixed a central seat of command. Only when opposed to an invader and struggling against him for the land did Celtic Ireland form for the time a united people; even then it could hardly be called a nation.

The Roman conqueror looked, but came not. It might have been better for Ireland if he had come. Yet, when he retired, he would probably have left the Romanized provincial, here as in Britain, too unwarlike to hold his own against the next invader.

A conqueror of a different kind came. He came in the person, not of a Roman general, but, if the tradition is true, of a slave. By the preaching of St. Patrick, according to the common belief, Ireland was added to the Kingdom of Christ. The conversion was rapid and probably superficial, the chief of the tribe carrying the tribe over with him, as Ethelbert of Kent and other English kinglets carried over their people, rather to a new religious allegiance than to a new faith.

Within the Roman Empire the centres of the Church had been the cities. Cities were the seats of its bishoprics. The models of its organization were urban. But in Ireland there were no cities. The episcopate was irregular and weak, denoting rank rather than authority or jurisdiction. The life of the Church was monastic and missionary. The weird Round Towers, believed to have been places of refuge for its ministers and their sacred vessels, as well as bell-towers, speak of a life surrounded by barbarism and rapine as well as threatened by the heathen and devastating Northmen. Partly perhaps owing to its comparative isolation and detachment at home, the Irish clergy was fired with a marvellous and almost preternatural zeal for the propagation of the Gospel abroad. It crossed the sea to Iona, the sacred isle, still to religious memory sacred, from which the light of the Gospel shone to the wild islesmen and to the rovers of the Northern Sea. Irish missionaries preached to heathen Germany, colliding there, it seems, with a more regular episcopate. They played a part in the conversion of Britain not less important than that of the missionaries of Rome, before whose authority, however, the Irish Church in the person of Aidan was at last compelled to retire, the decisive struggle taking place on the mode of celebrating Easter.

In Ireland itself there arose in connection with the Church a precocious and romantic passion for learning which founded primitive universities. Its memory lingers in the melancholy ruins of Clonmacnoise. This was the delusive brightness of a brief day, to be followed by the darkness of a long night.

The Church of Ireland seems in its origin to have been national and neither child nor vassal of Rome. Its theology must have been independent if Scotus Erigena was its son. But Rome gradually cast her spell, in time she extended her authority, over it. Its heads looked to her as the central support of the interests of their order and as their protectress against the rude encroachments of the native chiefs. Norman Archbishops of Canterbury served as transmitters of the influence. Still, the Irish Church was not in Roman eyes perfectly regular. Tithes were not paid, nor was the rule of consanguinity observed, or the rite of baptism administered in strict accordance with the ordinances of Rome.

Christianity did not kill the brood of a lively superstition, the fairy, the banshee, the spectre, charms, amulets, prophecies, wild legends, which in the times of gloom that followed strengthened their hold upon Irish imagination.

Hostile invasion came first in the form of the Northmen, whose piracy and rapine extended to Ireland as well as to Gaul and Britain. Piracy and rapine we call them now, but to the Northmen they seemed no more criminal than to us seems hunting or fishing. The chief objects of the invader’s attack were the monasteries, at once treasuries of Church wealth and hateful to the people of Odin. Ruthlessly the Northman slew and burned. His fleet made him ubiquitous and baffled defence, union for which there was not at first among the tribes. Common danger at last enforced it. A national leader arose in the person of Brian Boru, who was for Ireland the military, though not the political, saviour that Alfred was for England. At the great battle of Clontarf, the host over which the Danish Raven flew was totally overthrown, and Ireland was redeemed from its ravages. The Dane, however, did not wholly depart. Exchanging the rover for the trader, he founded a set of little maritime commonwealths at Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, and Limerick, germs on a small scale and in a rude way of municipal as well as commercial life.

But a conqueror, more fell and more tenacious than the Dane, was at hand. In 1169 a little fleet of Welsh vessels ran into the Bay of Bannow. From it landed a band of mail-clad soldiery, men trained to war, with a corps of archers. They were Normans from Wales under the leadership of the Anglo-Norman rover Fitzstephen, and were the precursors of a larger body which presently followed, under Richard Strigul, Earl of Pembroke, from the strength of his arm surnamed Strongbow. Dermot, an Irish chief, expelled for his tyranny, had brought these invaders on his country as the instruments of his revenge. Henry II. had, by giving letters of marque, sanctioned the enterprise, the fruits of which he intended to reap. Early in his reign the king had obtained from Pope Adrian IV., an Englishman by birth, a bull authorizing him to take possession of Ireland, which with other islands the bull declared of right to be an appanage of the Holy See. Here, as in the case of William’s invasion of England, the Papacy used Norman conquest as the instrument of its own aggrandizement. The authenticity of the bull is disputed by Irish patriotism, but in vain. No one questions the share of the Papacy in the Norman conquest of England.

With the aid of his Norman allies, to whom the Irishman with his naked valour was as the Mexican to the Spaniard, Dermot prevailed and glutted his revenge by plucking from the triumphal pyramid of hostile heads that of his chief enemy and tearing it with his teeth. But in this case, as in that of the alliance of Cortez with the Tlascalans, the ally had conquered for himself. Declining to be dislodged, he proceeded to establish himself and to organize a Norman principality.

Now the jealousy of the English king was aroused. He saw an independent Anglo-Norman kingdom on the point of being founded by Strongbow in Ireland. He published the papal bull, came over to Ireland in his power, and held his court at Dublin in a palace of wickerwork run up in native style for the occasion, where the Irish chiefs bowed their heads, but not their hearts, before him. He organized a feudal principality with himself as lord, but having the Pope as its suzerain, and tributary to the Papacy. He formally introduced the organization of a feudal kingdom. He held at Cashel a synod like that held by William the Conqueror at Winchester for the purpose of reforming, that is thoroughly Romanizing, the Church of Ireland. Irregularities respecting infant baptism and the matrimonial table of consanguinity were set right. The payment of tithes, that paramount duty of piety, was enjoined. Rome was installed in full authority, thus in Ireland, as in England, receiving from her Norman liegemen her share of their prize. With this pious offering to the Papacy in his hand, Henry departed to meet his responsibility for the slaying of Becket. He was presently succeeded for a short time in Ireland by his hopeful boy, John, whose personal behaviour was an earnest of the future tenour of his reign. Afterward, as king, John paid Ireland another flying visit in which, besides pouncing on an enemy, he seems to have made a fleeting attempt to regulate the government.

Henry, had he not been called away by the storm following the death of Becket, might have left things in better shape, but nothing could make up for the permanent absence of the king. Two antagonistic systems henceforth confronted each other. On one side was the feudal system, with its hierarchy of land-owners, from lord-paramount to tenant-paravail; its individual ownership of land; its hereditary succession and primogeniture; its feudal perquisites, relief, wardship, and marriage; its tribute of military service; the loyalty to the grantor of the fief which was its pervading and sustaining spirit; its knighthood and its chivalry; its Great Council of barons and baronial bishops; its feudal courts of justice and officers of state; all however highly rude and imperfect. On the other side was tribalism, with its tie of original kinship instead of territorial subordination; its tanistry; its Brehon law. But the feudal system in Ireland lacked the keystone of its arch. It was destitute of its regulating and controlling power, the king. A royal justiciar could not fill the part. From the outset the bane of the principality was delegated rule.

Ireland was a separate realm, though attached to the Crown of England. It had a Parliament of its own, which followed that of England in its development, being at first a unicameral council of magnates, lay and clerical; but after the legislation of Edward I. a bicameral assembly with a Lower House formed of representatives of counties and boroughs, whose consent would be formally necessary to taxation. Representatives of Ireland were at first called to Edward’s Parliament at Westminster, but the inconvenience seems to have been found too great. Weak, however, was the Parliament of the colony compared with that of the imperial country. If the Lords ever showed force, the making of a House of Commons was not there. The representation, as well as the proceedings and the records, appears to have been very irregular. Nothing worthy of the name of Parliamentary government seems ever to have prevailed. Among those who signed the Great Charter was the Archbishop of Dublin; but of chartered rights Ireland was not the scene. There is no appearance of a separate grant of subsidies by the clerical estate. The clergy, it seems, were represented by their proctors in the Lower House, as by the bishops and abbots in the Upper House. The Parliament appears to have been generally a tool in the hands of the deputy. The irregularity of its composition seems to have extended to its meetings.

From the first the relation between the feudal realm and that of the tribes was border war. They were alien to each other in race, language, and social habits, as well as in political institutions. The Norman could not subdue the Celt, the Celt could not oust the Norman. The conquest of England by William of Normandy had been complete, and had given birth to a national aristocracy, which in time blended with the conquered race and united with it in extorting the Great Charter. The Norman colony in Ireland was left to its feeble resources, and to a divided command, while the monarchy was far away over sea, was squandering its forces in French fields, and could not even project a complete conquest. Besides, there were the difficulties which the country, with its broad rivers, its bogs, its mountains and forests, opposed to the heavy cavalry of the Anglo-Norman. There was the mobility of a pastoral people, presenting no cities or centres of any kind for attack, driving its cattle to the woods on the approach of the invader, and eluding his pursuit like birds of the air. Thus the Anglo-Norman colony failed to become a dominion and presently dwindled to a pale. Between the Pale and the Celt incessant war was waged with the usual atrocity of struggles between the half-civilized and the savage. Fusion there could be none. There was not the bond of human brotherhood or that of a common tongue. On neither side was the murder of the other race a crime. Never was there a more inauspicious baptism of a nation.

Anglo-Norman and Celt, feudalist and tribesman, alike were Catholics. A common religion might have been a bond, a common clergy might have been a mediating power. But race and language prevailed over religion. The Churches, though outwardly of the same faith, remained inwardly separate, and not only separate but hostile to each other, the clergy on both sides sharing the spirit and the atrocities of race enmity and frontier war. The Church of the tribes was still very rough and irregular. The Norman on his part was devout. He was a founder of monasteries, thereby discharging his conscience of a load not seldom heavy. Whatever of religious life and activity there was in the Pale seems to have been monastic. Our glimpses of the secular clergy show that they were secular indeed. Among them not neglect of duty only but criminality appears to have been rife.

In the little commercial towns of Danish foundation on the coast which had been taken over by the Norman, life was probably rather more civilized; but they were too diminutive to exert any influence beyond their gates. Galway in time became the port of an active trade with Spain which is supposed to have left a Spanish trace on its architecture and a Spanish strain in the blood of its people.