The Old Irish World

The opportunity for carrying out this work was as surprising as its conception. The great scholar Petrie, who was at the time founding the museum of the Royal Irish Academy and in great measure founding too its library, was in 1833 set at the head of the historical department of the Survey, and charged with the task of collecting the true names of baronies, townlands, and parishes, and the investigation of ancient monuments. He gathered round him a staff of Irish scholars – men of the soil, heirs of the Irish tradition – John O’Donovan, Eugene O’Curry, J. O’Connor, P. O’Keefe, along with Clarence Mangan, Du Noyer, Wakeman, and others, all filled with the same spirit, and fired with the desire of producing a perfect work. Never perhaps had there been such a combination of talent directed to the one end of restoring Irish knowledge. For the first time during centuries of exclusion, Irish students were brought into close and constant communication in their own country with men of trained intelligence, and encouraged to use their skill for the benefit of their country. Once more Ireland had such a school as those which in the periods of her great revivals in the twelfth and fifteenth centuries gathered up and left to us all the relics of Irish history that we possess. Once more a kind of peripatetic University was set up, in the very spirit of the older Irish life.

The astonishing enthusiasm of these zealots is shown by the almost incredible record of their work in half a dozen years. It is such things as these that reveal to us the soul of Irish Nationality and the might of its repression. We can but stand astonished before the unstinted labour, before the miraculous accomplishment, of that company of workers. The work was new, travel was slow, and hardship frequent: but every difficulty vanished before their consuming ardour. Petrie’s band has left, besides maps, sketches, and documents of a general nature, not less than four hundred and sixty-eight large volumes of documents relating to Irish topography, language, history, and antiquities. A collection was made of over sixty thousand names, of their mutations, their various spellings, their meanings, and translations in English; when this work was completed a skilled Irish scholar was sent to every district to learn there from Irish speakers the vernacular name, and to collect traditions and legends, and note any antiquities that had been omitted. The traditions of Ireland at that time had not been wholly broken. In Petrie’s writings we can still see the Irish multitudes who in the depth of their poverty preserved the memories of their race and their holy places, and the national pilgrims gathering round their old shrines “with the utmost fervency of devotion, and in all their movements an abstracted intensity of feeling that carries the mind back to remote times.” In spite of much destruction, in spite of the lamentable absence in the new landlords of Ireland of proper pride and national feeling, there still remained a mass of ancient monuments preserved by the pious memories of the people, crosses, graveyards, old paths, and names and histories; which have been since swept away in the horrors of famine and emigration and the devastating land commercialism let loose by the Encumbered Estates Act.

The first memoir published by the Ordnance Survey in 1837, the account of Derry, was hailed with universal enthusiasm. “Irishmen of all sects and parties felt that in such work as this they would have for the first time the materials for a true history of their country.” But the Government interfered. The Topographical Survey was closed, the staff discharged, and the vast mass of material, comprising among other things upwards of four hundred quarto volumes of letters and documents relating to the topography, language, history, antiquities, productions, and social state of almost every county in Ireland, were ordered to be kept, idle and useless, in the Survey Office at Mountjoy barracks. The reason given was the cost. At this time England was drawing from Ireland to her own use some three millions a year above her expenditure there. It was shown that the sale of the memoir was such as would probably defray the whole expense. The Government objected to treating history and political economy as subjects which might re-open questions of Irish party divisions: it was answered that the events of history could not be buried in oblivion, since they had occurred and their effects continue, and it was well for the public to have a plain impartial record of bare facts, since on neither side were the facts yet known.

In answer to the vehement protests of all Ireland, a Commission was appointed under a new Government in 1843. It advised that the work should be continued, and urged the importance of the time, for monuments and language were alike disappearing: it recommended that the vast mass of collected material now lying waste should be published, since “no enquirer until the officers of the Survey commenced their labours, has ever brought an equal amount of local knowledge, sound criticism, and accurate acquaintance with the Irish language to bear upon it.” The Government took no notice. It was believed by the best-informed that some strong concealed influence urged on ministers that it was dangerous to open up to the people the memory of their fathers and their old society, or remind them of the boundaries of their clans and families. In vain the best Irishmen of the day, of every race and religion, pleaded for a braver view of truth and statesmanship. Political influences, the fears of absentee landlords or of a Protestant ascendancy, prevailed in London. English rulers dreaded the knowledge of the Irish more than they dreaded their ignorance; and the door was shut on history, science, and truth, with the results that we have seen in succeeding generations.

By this act much knowledge was finally obliterated: no such opportunity can ever occur again. Much more was set back for a hundred years, and ignorance still left enthroned. We may still hear men professing, as though time had stood still, the doctrines Petrie reported in vogue a century ago: “The history and antiquities of Ireland previous to the English Invasion, are wholly unworthy of notice, or, at best, involved in obscurity and darkness such as no sane mind would venture to penetrate.” Irish history, buried by two Governments, was supposed to have no resurrection: instead of the serious enquiry inaugurated by the old Survey, modern statesmen will assure us through Mr. Balfour that for talk of Irish ideas and institutions, “there is no historic basis whatever.”

The Royal Irish Academy applied for the custody of a part of the Survey records, which were given to its keeping in 1860; and have there been consulted for local or county histories. Meanwhile the Survey was continued in an innocuous form without the historic virus. Directed from Southampton, English “division officers” in Dublin, Belfast and Cork conduct the Irish Survey. Their maps may serve practical purposes of buying and selling land, and even present accurately all modern features, police barracks and the like. But they offer doubtful help to the curious historian on the road of scientific enquiry. The spirit and purpose of the older research has been banished. Irish antiquities are no longer objects of interest or of skilled observation; Irish names are treated in many cases as an insurmountable difficulty; any ordered attempt at their right spelling is abandoned. The ancient fort of Lisnalinchy in Antrim has been allotted the happy name of Silentia, as if to give to a deep-buried Irish history the respectability of a mock Roman tombstone. Port-na-veadog, the port of the plover, appears as Dog’s Bay. Professor Macalister, examining the ancient ruins on the Carrowkeel mountain in Co. Sligo, has reported there the remarkable site of one of the oldest village settlements in northern Europe, with remains of over forty-seven structures; and hard by an ancient cemetery with fourteen carns left by the old builders. The Survey has been there, and has marked the height of the beacon it erected on one of the finest of the carns, but has left on the map no record of this conspicuous and striking carn as an ancient monument. The most important of the structures, eighty-seven feet in diameter and twenty-five in height, is marked by an indefinite symbol, and not as having any character of antiquity. While nearly all the chief carns were omitted, by some chance or curious scruple of conscience one or two of the smaller examples have been noted. Of twenty-three place names in the square mile of country only nine are recorded. Names here and elsewhere are set down in an Anglicised and phonetic spelling, often atrocious in form. As Professor Macalister observes, nothing could more clearly prove than this characteristic effort of the Ordnance Survey in Ireland the absolute necessity of a thorough re-survey, under expert superintendence, of the archæology and place names of the country. All historians, all Irishmen alike, must ardently join in such an entreaty, for the honour of their land. Is it too much to hope that this national work may not be for ever left to indifferent hands, but that Irish scholars may yet be given the patriotic task of saving what yet remains on Irish soil of the inheritance of her people.

Of one thing, however, we may be sure. The reform of Irish history must begin in our own country, among our own people. Since it is public opinion that at the last decides what our people shall learn of their father-land, we ourselves must be the keepers of our fame and the makers of our history. Let us in Ireland therefore remember that we have an ancestry on which there is no need for us to cry shame. Chivalry, learning, patriotism, poetry, have been found there, even “in huts to which an Englishman would have hesitated to give the name of a house.” No people have ever surpassed them in exaltation or intensity of spiritual life. The sun has risen and set in that land on lives of courage, honour, and beauty. The seasons have watched the undying effort to make Ireland the honoured home of a united people. Not a field that has not drunk in the blood of men and women poured out for the homes of their fathers. Why should not we, the sons and daughters of Ireland, take our rich inheritance? “Let us enjoy, whenever we have an opportunity, the delight of admiration, and perform the duties of reverence.” So long as the Spirit of life is over us, I do not know, and I hope you do not know, why we in this country should not be worthy of our dead.

CHAPTER II

THE TRADE ROUTES OF IRELAND

A DISCUSSION of the Trade Routes of Ireland may seem to some a superfluous and barren task. It has long been a fashion to look on the country as an island, “remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow.” Writers have pictured it as lying through the centuries in primitive barbarism, an outlying desolation of poverty and disorder. The blame of this desolation is sometimes laid on the savagery of the people, sometimes on the position of the island, at the very “ends of the earth.” No doubt there has been a certain political convenience in the very usual argument that the geographical position of Ireland, lying so near to Great Britain, makes it immediately dependent on that country alone, so that it could by nature have no real converse with Europe, and no door of civilisation save through England. An island beyond an island – such is reputed the forlorn position of Ireland. We all naturally believe that which we constantly hear or frequently repeat: and it is well from time to time to ask ourselves what reason may lie behind common tradition – in this special case to enquire what geography and history may have to tell us of the natural trade routes of Ireland and of England in former times.

From the map it is plain that the two islands have a very different outlook. Michelet has pictured Europe with all her main rivers and harbours opening to the west, and the island of Great Britain alone lying as a mighty ship poised on the ocean with her prow fronting the orient. The Thames opens its harbour to the east, the capital looks to the east, and the early trading centres, the Cinque Ports, turn to the sunrising. Thus the natural way of trade and travel from England to the Continent has always been by the narrow seas – across the Channel or the North Sea to the convenient river-mouths and harbours of the north European plain. Ireland was in a different case. If the opposite British coast, for the most part inhospitable mountain and forest, offered to her in early times a slender trade and a harsh welcome, she on her side did not turn to it her best natural ports. Those on the east coast from Waterford to Belfast are few; Dublin, left to itself, is a poor harbour; and from thence to Belfast there is only one small port, Ardglass, where the entrance is safe at low tide. The chief harbours of Ireland in fact were those that swelled with the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Her outlook was across its stormy waters, and her earliest traffic through the perils of the Gaulish sea. The English were concerned with the north and east of Europe, the Irish with the south and west, and their paths did not cross.

For Ireland, therefore, the road to Europe did not lie across Great Britain. As far back as we can see into the primitive darkness the inhabitants of the island were all in turn out on the great seas. An old myth or legend tells of the ancient Manannan Mac Lir, “Son of the Sea,” who was the best pilot that was in the west of Europe, and the greatest reader of the sky and weather: or who in another tale appears a sea-god triumphant over the ocean as his boat raced under him on the immensity of the waters like a chariot on the summer fields, while he sang in his joy – “That is to me a happy plain with a profusion of flowers, looking from the chariot of two wheels.” Ireland, in times beyond the reach of history, lay on the high-road of an ancient trade between the countries we know as Scandinavia and Gaul. Even in the Stone age its people cut some of their flint arrows after the fashion of Portugal, or carried them from that peninsula across the Bay of Biscay; and fragments of stone cups have been found in Ireland, as in Britain, which are said to have come from the Mediterranean by the Gaulish sea. As for the northern traffic, we have traces of it more than a thousand years before the Christian era in burial mounds of the Bronze age, where there are stones carved with a form of ornament which in western Europe is only found in Scandinavia and Ireland.

It was during the Bronze age that the first Gaelic or Goidelic invaders entered Ireland, coming not through Britain but over-sea from Spain and Gaul, from the openings of the Garonne and the Loire, or from the ports of Brittany. And by that open highway sailed also later settlers from southern and northern Gaul. Some relics of these conquering tribes, fine rivetted trumpets of bronze made after the fashion of the continent, of the same pattern as those used in central France about the Loire, show that they kept up intercourse with their people abroad. For centuries, in fact, this intercourse can be traced. An invasion of the Gauls in the third century b. c. left to Leinster its old name of Laigen, from the broad-headed lances which they carried; and five hundred years later, in the second century a. d., Irish princes used to send to Gaul for soldiers to serve in their wars.

In the time of the Roman Empire therefore Irish trade with Europe was already well established. Tacitus (a. d. 98) tells that its ports and harbours were well known to merchants; and in the second century the geographer Ptolemy of Alexandria gave a list, very surprising for the time, of the river-mouths, mountains, and port towns of Ireland, and its sea-coast tribes – a knowledge he may have gained from Marinus of Tyre, or the Syrian traders who conducted the traffic from Asia Minor to the Rhone, and thence across the Gaulish Sea. Italy exported her wine in the second century b. c.; and in the second century a. d., four hundred years later, when wine was grown on the hill sides of Provence it may have reached Irish ports, transported by merchants of Marseilles to the Garonne, or by the valleys of the Rhone and the Loire, and thence across the sea. They travelled in ships built to confront Atlantic gales, with high poops standing out of the water like castles, and great leathern sails – stout hulls that were steered and worked by the born sailors of the Breton coast. From Brittany the passage to Ireland could be made in three days. From the Loire it was two days longer, as we may see from a later Irish story of the sixth century which tells how a ship-load of strangers, five decades of them, came sailing from the lands of Latium on pilgrimage to Ireland. Each decade of pilgrims took with them an Irish saint to guide and protect the vessel, every one in his turn for a day and a night, which gives a voyage of five days and nights. As they neared the Irish coast a fierce storm arose, and St. Senan, who was that day guardian of the company, rose from dinner with a thigh-bone in his hand, and blessing the air with the bone brought the pilgrims safe into Cork harbour. The saint was a practical sailor and pilot, and he had been allotted the best joint, the portion which by Irish law was given to the king or the high poet.

But while traders of the Empire sailed to Ireland, the armies of Rome never crossed the Irish Sea. Ireland therefore lay outside the Roman Empire, while it lay within the circle of imperial civilisation and commerce. Christianity first came from across the Gaulish Sea, and the art of writing, and new forms of ornament. From Gaul the Irish learned to divide tribe-land into private property marked by boundary stones. Roman-Hellenistic learning, which spread from northern Italy to Marseilles, crossed the Irish seas with the merchants of Aquitaine carrying the wine of Bordeaux; or it was brought home by Irish scholars of the fourth century who went to seek learning in Narbonne, where Greek was spoken as a living tongue. The Irish Pelagius, who went to Italy in 400, was able to carry on a discussion in Jerusalem in 415 with Orosius the Spaniard, in which he spoke Greek while Orosius needed an interpreter: if he had not learned Greek in Ireland, Zimmer reminds us, he would not have been able to learn it in Rome. Nearly two hundred years later, in 595, the Irish saint Columbanus and his companions knew Greek, but Gregory the Great did not know it, though he had twice been Papal nuncio in Constantinople. Ovid and Vergil were known and read in Ireland, where scholars seem to have taken all that Rome had to give of classical culture and philosophy.

It is often assumed that to share in the benefits of an empire it is necessary to be a subject country, lying within its police control, and that the Irish suffered by never having been forced under the authority of Rome. Perhaps, however, we might learn here another lesson – that in matters of civilisation what is really needed is not subjection to force, but free human converse and the willing intercourse of men. We have the spectacle of an island beyond the military rule, the police control, the law, of the Roman empire, willingly adopting all the spiritual good which Rome could give it, and the culture that the intelligence of its people found to suit them. Free to keep her own customs, Ireland could gain this new learning without losing her own civilization and her pride of language, history, and law. It was in seas of blood that such national pride was wiped out by Roman conquerors from the plains of Gaul. But for the Irish at that time there was no violent breach with the traditions of their race, nor any humiliation or bondage to darken their high spirit; and in the joyful and brilliant activity of the succeeding centuries they illustrated the free and peaceful union of two civilizations.

Ireland had another advantage from her place of freedom on the open highways of the sea. For lying outside the Empire she was saved from the economic ruin that fell on all the Roman dominions when, by the fatal policy of the Empire, enterprise and wealth were sucked to the centre and capital, draining the provinces bare; so that, for example, witnesses of that time describe the once wealthy port of Cadiz as a town of great empty warehouses, silent and deserted, save for a few poor old men and women creeping about its melancholy streets. Her position saved her too when the barbarians swept over the Empire. As she had been unconquered by the Romans so she remained unconquered by Teuton or English. Her learning did not perish before invaders; and if on the mainland every old line of communication was closed or broken, her way of the ocean was still free. It is true that the wars of the English invaders of Britain for some hundred and fifty years (449-597) barred all passage through it to the Continent. But that route had never been of any real consequence. A way to Europe across Britain was no doubt known to the Irish in Roman times, and some pilgrims journeyed by that way across the Empire. But this was not the main route for travellers from Ireland, and it was never the line of their continental trade. There seems to have been little communication on the whole with Britain. Settlers went over from Ireland to Scotland, to Wales, to the Cornish peninsula, and founded Irish colonies. But in the main the Irish troubled themselves very little about Britain at all. In fact from the third century onwards they were accustomed to give to all strangers the name of “Galls,” from Gallos, the people of Gaul, the chief visitors they knew.

To the Irish the important thing therefore was that the way of the sea was still open. Traders from Gaul sailed along the western coast, and up the Shannon to Roscommon and Loch Cé, and on the eastern side their ships passed by the Irish Sea to what is now Down and Antrim, to Iona, and Cantyre. They still as of old carried the wine of Provence in great wooden tuns, in one of which three men could stand upright; there still came men speaking Greek, and scholars of the east, and artists of Gaul. At this time indeed the Irish were no recluse people, living in a backwater or severed from the great world. An Old Irish poem tells of the traditions of Leinster under its ancient kings – “The sweet strain heard there at every hour; its wine-barque upon the purple flood; its shower of silver of great splendour; its torques of gold from the lands of the Gaul.” The metropolis of Columcille’s church organization at Iona, the established centre of Irish learning at Bangor in Down, both alike lay in the track of the sailing ships, and in frequent communication with Europe. News of the destruction by earthquake of Citta Nuova in Istria was brought to Columcille that same year by Gaulish mariners. Columbanus and his companions could take ship from Bangor to Nantes on their mission to Europe (589). Northwards Irishmen sailed to the Hebrides, the Orkneys, the Shetlands. They seem to have traded and married with Scandinavians a century before the invasion of Ireland by the Wikings. Moreover Irishmen had travelled as far as Iceland in 795, where Nadoddr the Norseman heard of them some sixty years later.

Thus the old civilization, rudely interrupted elsewhere, was carried on unbroken in Ireland. Now was the time (500-1000) when the island began to give back to Europe the treasures of learning which she had stored up in the time of the Roman Empire, and had kept safely through the barbarian wars. Missionaries and scholars from Iona and Ireland carried letters and Christian teaching to every part of England, while ship-loads of Englishmen went to Ireland for instruction. Other Irishmen sailed to Brittany, and journeyed east over northern France beyond the Rhine. A greater number travelled by Nantes, Angers, Tours, past the monastery of Columbanus at Lisieux, and thence over middle Europe, or by St. Gall southward through Italy as far as Tarentum, and to the Holy Land. Occasionally pilgrims and missionaries took the road to Europe through Britain, when with the settlement of the English kingdoms and the coming of Augustine (597) a new intercourse had opened between the English and the continental peoples. That is, some few travellers went this way, but merchants still kept to the old sea route, and the greater number of Irish pilgrims and scholars. It was by that way, for example, according to the old story by a monk of St. Gall, that two Scots from Ireland sailed to Gaul in the early days of Charles the Great, and in the market-place, where the merchants trafficked with the crowds, raised their cry of an Irish trade: – “If anyone is desirous of wisdom, let him come to us and receive it, for we have it to sell.” At last they were brought to Charles himself, who asked what payment they would need; nothing more, they answered, than convenient situations, ingenious minds, and as living in a foreign country to be supplied with food and raiment; and the king formed a school for one of them in France, and set the other at the head of the great school at Pavia. Irish monasteries, one after another in rapid order, rose along the main highways of travel, among the ruined heaps of Roman towns where wild beasts alone found shelter, in forest and desert and mountain. Every school had Irish teachers and Irish manuscripts, relics of which still remain in continental libraries. Ireland became the source of culture to all Germanic nations: indeed wherever in the seventh and following centuries education or knowledge is found it may be traced directly or indirectly to Irish influence. It has been justly said that at the time of Charles the Bald every one who spoke Greek on the Continent was almost certainly an Irishman, or taught by an Irishman. By degrees Irish monasteries, built and supported by Irish money, spread over Europe from Holland to Tarentum, from Gaul to Bulgaria.