Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages: History, culture and society (Trinity Medieval Ireland Series) [None ed.] 9781846827938, 9781846829895, 1846827930

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Other volumes in this series: The Geraldines and medieval Ireland: the making of a myth Peter Crooks & Seán DuΩy, editors The Irish church, its reform and the English invasion

Government, war and society in medieval Ireland: essays by Edmund Curtis, A.J. Otway-Ruthven and James Lydon Peter Crooks, editor

N

o w a d a y s , medieval Gaelic Ulster is virtually invisible. Physical evidence from the four centuries stretching between the invasion of the Anglo-Norman baron John de Courcy and the Plantation is rare. Although it left little physical trace, Gaelic Ulster was once a vigorous, confident society, whose members fought and feasted, sang and prayed. It maintained schools of poets, physicians, historians and lawyers, whose studies were conducted largely in their own Gaelic (Early Modern Irish) language, rather than in the dead Latin of medieval schools elsewhere in Europe. This monumental book explores the neglected history of Gaelic Ulster between the eleventh and early sixteenth centuries, and sheds further light on its unique society. The first section, ‘Political History’, provides the reader with a chronological narrative, showing the influence of internal and external political change on the Ulster chieftains, while also illustrating how this northern province related to the rest of Ireland. The second section, ‘Culture and Society’, aims to depict the world of Ulster during the Middle Ages. It delves into the ‘plain living and high thinking’ of its somewhat enigmatic society, operating largely independently of towns or coinage, describing in turn its chieftains, churchmen, scholars, warriors, court ladies and other women, and the amusements and everyday life of the people. Here Katharine Simms illuminates the hidden world of medieval Gaelic Ulster and its denizens. Above all one receives a lasting impression of the people’s resilience in this war-torn society, their ability to make best use of the natural resources around them, not merely to survive, and even enjoy themselves.

FOUR COURTS PRESS

The jacket, by Anú Design, incorporates a detail from an engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar (c.1644?), An Irishwoman in her national costume of a shaggy frieze cloak. Image from Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto.

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TRINIT Y MEDIEVAL IREL AND SERIES: 4

Medieval Gaelic sources Katharine Simms The world of the galloglass: kings, warlords and warriors in Ireland and Scotland, 1200–1600

Katharine Simms

Katharine Simms lectured in medieval history at Trinity College Dublin until 2010. She has written From kings to warlords: the changing political structure of Gaelic Ireland in the later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1987), Medieval Gaelic sources (Dublin, 2009), and many articles on Gaelic Ireland.

Also from Four Courts Press

Seán Duffy, editor

Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages

Donnchadh Ó Corráin

Katharine Simms

The kings of Aileach and the Vikings, ad 800–1060 Darren McGettigan The making of medieval Derry Ciarán J. Devlin Life and death in medieval Gaelic Ireland: the skeletons from Ballyhanna, Co. Donegal  Catriona J. McKenzie & Eileen M. Murphy Princes, prelates and poets in medieval Ireland: essays in honour of Katharine Simms Seán Duffy, editor

Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages History, culture and society TRINIT Y MEDIEVAL IREL AND SERIES: 4

Ireland under the Normans, 1169–1333 Goddard Henry Orpen

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages H I S T O RY, C U LT U R E A N D S O C I E T Y

Katharine Simms

Trinity Medieval Ireland Series: 4

F O U R C O U RT S P R E S S

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Set in EhrhardtMTPro 10.5pt on 12.5pt by Carrigboy Typesetting Services for F O U R C O U RT S P R E S S LT D

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c/o IPG, 814 N Franklin St, Chicago, IL 60610.

© Katharine Simms and Four Courts Press 2020

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-84682-793-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-84682-989-5 (ebook)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and publisher of this book.

SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This publication has been generously supported by the Trinity College Dublin Association and Trust.

Printed in England by CPI Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts.

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Contents

L I S T O F I L LU S T R AT I O N S AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S N O T E O N I R I S H P L AC E A N D P E R S O N A L N A M E S L I S T O F A B B R E V I AT I O N S

8 10 12 13

S E C T I O N O N E : P O L I T I C A L H I S T O RY

Introduction 21 Why focus on Ulster? 21 How archaic was Gaelic society? Kingship, law and the learned classes 24 1 Early background: Ulster’s central role in Irish history Medieval Ulster’s heritage from the Iron Age The rise of the Uí Néill and the high-kingship of Tara The primacy of the church of Armagh over the rest of Ireland The creation of a secular literature for Ireland

33 33 43 55 60

2 Eleventh to twelfth centuries: Ulster’s growing isolation Replacement of the O’Neill provincial kings by the MacLaughlin dynasty Career of Domnall MacLaughlin Succession disputes and rebellion: an end to hereditary coarbs in Armagh The reign of the high-king Muirchertach MacLaughlin MacLaughlin–O’Neill rivalry

69

3 The Ulster earldom to the late thirteenth century: co-existence and Anglicization The conquest of the Ulaid by John de Courcy The creation of the earldom of Ulster under Hugh de Lacy the younger The reign of Áed Méith O’Neill MacLaughlin revival ‘High-kingship’ of Brian O’Neill De Burgh–O’Neill cooperation

5

70 72 75 77 81

84 84 89 90 94 98 100

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Contents 4 The fourteenth century: absenteeism and Gaelic recovery The Bruce invasion The de Mandeville revolt and murder of Earl William de Burgh Provincial kingship of the Great O’Neill of Tír Eógain The expeditions of King Richard II

110 110 115 118 139

5 The fifteenth century: ‘a balance of power’? – Gaelic and Anglo-Irish paramount lordships Revolt in east Ulster The O’Neill succession struggle and rise of Niall Garb O’Donnell The influence of the 4th earl of Ormond

148 148 153 172

6 The Ulster chiefs and the Geraldine chief governors The earldom of Ulster becomes vested in the English crown The Geraldine hegemony under the Yorkists Ulster and the Geraldines under Lancastrian rule The fall of the House of Kildare

186 186 192 202 216

S E C T I O N T W O : C U LT U R E A N D S O C I E T Y

7 Kings and kingship Succession to kingship Kingship and landownership The hierarchy of authority: clientship and political submission Administration and control The ideology of kingship: king versus kin-head

233 234 237 239 244 249

8 The church in medieval Ulster The power of the pre-reform church in Ulster The structures of the pre-reform church Consequences of church reform and the Anglo-Norman invasion Resistance to reform Armagh and the primacy of Nicholas Mac Máel Ísa The English archbishops The fifteenth century: the Observant movement, lay piety and pilgrimage Popular beliefs and superstitions

268 268 269 280 290 301 306

9 Ulster poets Early poets and the supernatural Poets and the pre-reform church schools

335 335 338

318 328

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Contents The impact of church reform: the rise of the bardic schools Poets and patrons in Ulster

7 342 361

10 Other Ulster ‘men of art/learning’ (áes eladan) Lands endowing the ‘men of art’ Senchaidi (historians) Brethemain (judges) Lega (physicians) Lucht ciúil (musicians) Ceird (craftsmen)

377 377 384 391 394 396 400

11 Warriors and warfare Warrior-bands (fíana) in prehistoric and early medieval Ireland Viking influence: the rise of mercenary soldiers Impact of the Anglo-Norman incursion and settlement The advent of the Scottish galloglass: the composition and use of later medieval armies The self-image of aristocratic warriors

404 404 410 416 419 426

12 Court ladies and the place of women in Gaelic society Women’s place in Brehon and canon law The role of queens Court ladies Women in general

435 435 441 450 456

13 The life of the people: popular assemblies, farming, houses, clothing and food The dispersed pattern of settlement Assemblies Everyday living conditions

459 459 463 472

14 Epilogue

495

BIBLIOGRAPHY

502

INDEX

543

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Illustrations 1 2 3 4 5 6

Map of modern barony boundaries in the north of Ireland 29 Map showing remains of Black Pig’s Dyke 34 Map of ‘The Ulster of the Tales’ 35 Map of Ulster in sixth century 40 Map of some early monastic foundations and battle sites 45 Genealogy illustrating the alternation of the high-kingship between the Northern and Southern Uí Néill, and doubtful lineal descent of the Mac Lochlainn dynasty 47 7 Genealogical background of de Courcy’s wife 87 8 Map showing the medieval administrative divisions of the earldom of Ulster 90 9 Castle of Carrickfergus 91 10 Genealogy illustrating the succession of the O’Neills of Tír Eógain (Tyrone) and the O’Neills of Clandeboy (south Antrim and north Down) from the late twelfth to early sixteenth centuries 96 11 Genealogy illustrating O’Donnell succession, thirteenth to sixteenth centuries 97 12 The castle of Northburgh, now Greencastle, Inishowen 107 13 Galloglass bodyguard surrounding O’Cahan tomb, Dungiven, Co. Derry 108 14 Genealogy illustrating succession to the earldom of Ulster 117 15 The seal of Áed O’Neill 125 16 Genealogy of the MacMahon kings of Airgialla, fourteenth to early fifteenth centuries, illustrating relations with the Clann Alexander MacDonald galloglasses 129 17 Harry Avery’s Castle 133 18 Some familial connections in the Savage family 151 19 Genealogy of the White family, fourteenth–fifteenth centuries 151 20 Selective genealogy of Magennis kings of Uí Echach, fourteenth– fifteenth centuries, with some indications of their alliances 152 21 & 22 Marginal illustrations from Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hibernica, showing inauguration scenes 292–3 23 Base of the shrine of the Cathach, showing inscription asking prayer for Cathbarr O’Donnell 294 24 Diagram of distribution of Ulster poems by subject 349 25 Diagram of distribution of all Ireland poems by subject 350

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Illustrations

26 Distribution of authors’ surnames for poems to Ulster patrons or by Ulster poets, twelfth to fifteenth centuries 351 27 High cross, Devenish Island, county Fermanagh 402 28 Dunvegan Cup 403 29 The Rhynie Man 405 30 White Island, Fermanagh, figure of ‘David’ 405 31 MacSweeney galloglass figures from 1567 map 420 32 Cattle-raid, from John Derricke’s Image of Irelande 422 33 Horse warriors from the base of the Market Cross, Kells 423 34 Irish horsemen in retreat, from John Derricke’s Image of Irelande 425 35 MacSweeney’s feast, from John Derricke’s Image of Irelande 447 36 Strawboy costume 473 37 & 38 The Irish frieze cloak on an Irishwoman and woman of Dieppe in Normandy, from engravings by Hollar 476–7 39 The Maguire’s castle at Enniskillen 486 40 O’Hagan’s house in Tullyhogue fort, from Bartlett’s Map III 487 41 Houses in Armagh city from Bartlett’s Map V 488 42 Construction of wickerwork coracle 493 P L AT E S

appear between pages 224 and 225 I Aerial view of Navan Ring (Emain Macha) II View of Tara showing the Mound of the Hostages III Map of northern kingdoms in the mid-twelfth century as approximately reflected in modern diocesan boundaries IV Aerial view of Tullyhogue Fort V Greenan Fort, Inishowen, county Donegal VI The shrine of St Patrick’s Bell VII Map of the north of Ireland in 1333 VIII Meeting between Art MacMurrough and the earl of Nottingham, from Jean Creton’s Chronicle 1399 IX Map of the north of Ireland at time of submission to Richard II X Map of the north of Ireland c.AD1449 XI Map of the north of Ireland in the 1460s XII Portrait of Gerald FitzGerald, 9th earl of Kildare XIII The inauguration of O’Neill on the mound at Tullyhogue. XIV Petrie’s drawing of diagram of the banqueting hall at Tara in the Book of Leinster XV Petrie’s drawing of diagram of the banqueting hall at Tara in the Yellow Book of Lecan XVI Lucas de Heere, ‘Irlandois et Irlandoise comme ils alloyent accoustres etans au seruice de feu Roy Henry’

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Acknowledgments This book has been an exceptionally long time in gestation, beginning with my BA dissertation in 1969 on ‘The O’Neills in the later Middle Ages’, followed by a PhD thesis (Dublin, 1976) on ‘Gaelic lordships in Ulster in the later Middle Ages’, so my first acknowledgments must go to my late supervisor, James Lydon, who inspired and encouraged me in what was then a relatively unusual field of enquiry. The two pioneering scholars who were ahead of me in the area of later medieval Gaelic Ireland, Kenneth Nicholls and the late Gearóid Mac Niocaill, were also extraordinarily generous and helpful. Concentrating as I did on Gaelic literary sources, and the registers of the medieval archbishops of Armagh, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my many colleagues researching Anglo-Irish history who not only drew my attention to relevant documents in the English and Anglo-Irish administrative records but often gave me their transcripts, in particular the late A.J. Otway-Ruthven, the late Phil Connolly, Robin Frame, Dorothy Johnson, Nicholas Canny, Seán Duffy and Brendan Smith among others, as also to the work of many research students under my supervision, named with acknowledgment in the relevant footnotes. I also owe much thanks to the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, School of Celtic Studies for six years of financial support, first as a scholar and then a Junior Research Fellow, where I benefited greatly from the classes and discussions with staff and scholars. More recently, I am most grateful to Susan Reynolds, who read an early draft of my chapter on kingship, to Luke McInerney who read a draft of my chapter on the church, to Mícheál Hoyne, for reading my chapters on the church and the learned classes, and to Peter Crooks for reading the whole book in draft, though I am of course responsible for any remaining errors. I owe an especial debt to the then Director during my time at DIAS, the late Brian Ó Cuív, for many patient hours attempting to equip me to read bardic poetry in the original, and for his facilitating my commencement of an electronic descriptive catalogue of as many bardic poems as I could identify in manuscripts and printed editions (https://bardic.celt.dias.ie/). In the continuation of this catalogue over many years of teaching in the Medieval History Department at Trinity College Dublin, I gained immeasurably from the cooperation of the Irish Department, especially Damian McManus, and his research team on the Trinity Bardic Poetry project. A grant from the the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) of a Senior Research Fellowship in

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Acknowledgments

2007–8 gave me the leisure from my teaching schedule to write up not only Medieval Gaelic sources in the series Maynooth Research Guides for Irish Local History (Dublin, 2009), but the first drafts of chapters 8–10 in the present work, dealing with the church and the learned classes. I owe my family a more practical debt than is usual in these cases, firstly for the academic assistance given by my husband Kim McCone, and last but by no means least, my daughter and son, Brigit and John, for reading through draft chapters and giving valuable editorial advice. * * * In relation to the illustrations for this book I owe much to the kindness of many people and institutions, for reproductions of material both in and out of copyright. For Figs. 2 and 3 I am indebted to James Mallory, editor of Emania, and the authors of the respective articles in Emania 3 and 14, Aidan Walsh (map with ‘Government permit no. 4832’) and Kay Muhr. For Fig. 8 I am grateful to Salters Sterling, trustee for the intellectual property of Prof. A.J. OtwayRuthven. From the photographic archives of TRIARC (Trinity Irish Art Research Centre) came both Fig. 13 (TCD Edwin Rae collection ©), and, with kind permission of Professor Stalley, Figs. 9, 12, 27 and 33 (TCD Roger Stalley collection ©). I owe Fig. 17 to the generosity of Frank McGettigan, and the kind mediation of Darren McGettigan. Figs 21, 22 and 40, 41 were obtained courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. Fig. 29 comes courtesy of the Aberdeenshire Council Archaeology Service ©. The Fermanagh County Museum and Helen Lanigan Wood kindly supplied me with an electronic image for Fig. 30 from the Welch collection in the National Museum of Northern Ireland. Fig. 31 came from National Archives, London (MPF 1/68). The Royal Irish Academy helped me with reproductions for Figs. 32, 34, 35 and Plates XIV and XV. Figs. 36, 42 and Plate VI are reproduced with kind permission of The National Museum of Ireland. Figs 37, 38 come from the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto. Permission to reproduce Plate I came from the Historic Environment Record of Northern Ireland (HERoNI), © Crown DfC Historic Environment Division. Plates II and V are © National Monuments Service, Department of Culture, Heritage, and the Gaeltacht. Plate IV came courtesy of the Centre for Archaeological Fieldwork, QUB, and Irish Sights. Plate VIII is ©British Library Board, Harley MS 1319, fo. 9. Plate XII has kind permission from the Duke of Leinster. Plate XIII comes courtesy of the Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Plate XVI is from Ghent University Library, BHSL.HS.2466. In conclusion, I owe particular thanks to Professor Elizabeth FitzPatrick, NUI Galway, who helped me to source a number of the illustrations.

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Note on Irish place and personal names A word should be said at the outset concerning the treatment of Irish spelling and Irish personal and place-names. Medieval scribes were very inconsistent in spelling until the literary reforms of the sixteenth century, so I have followed Martin Freeman’s practice when he translated the Annals of Connacht, of adopting a form of Old Irish spelling where lenition is only shown in the case of the letters ‘c’, ‘f ’, ‘p’, ‘t’ and ‘s’, but without applying the nasalization that would have followed the, by then, obsolete neuter gender. This is also the format used in the New History of Ireland volume 2 up to the end of the thirteenth century, except that I have replaced the surname element ‘Ua’ with ‘Ó’, and continued to apply the same system to names in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries also, for consistency. In the case of direct quotation from printed editions, I have retained the spelling of their respective editors. However, to make the readers’ task easier, I make use of the Anglicized versions of chieftains’ surnames once these have evolved, from about the eleventh century onwards, inserting the original Irish form in brackets at the first occurrence of the name. I also use the original English form for Christian names borrowed from English into Irish, except for Seaán, as this seems a borrowing from the medieval French, ‘Jehan’. On the other hand, in the case of surnames of medieval Irish poets and authors, I retain the Irish form, as this is how they are most commonly known, and in some cases the English form might render them unrecognizable, e.g., Conroy for Ó Máelchonaire, or Cruise for Mac Fhirbisig. Nicknames are distinguished by italics.

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Abbreviations ABM AFM

AI Aithd. ALC Anal. Hib. Anc. Laws Ire. Ann. Clonm. Ann. Conn. Ann. Grace Ann. MacFirb.

Ann. Tig.

Armagh Hist. & Soc. AU Bergin, IBP Bhreathnach, Tara Bieler, The Patrician texts Binchy, Críth Gablach Bk Fen.

Damian McManus and Eoghan Ó Raghallaigh (eds), A bardic miscellany (Trinity Irish Studies no. 2, Dublin, 2010). John O’Donovan (ed.), Annals of the kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters (7 vols, Dublin, 1856, reprinted with unpaginated introduction by Kenneth Nicholls, Dublin, 1990). Seán Mac Airt (ed.), The Annals of Inisfallen (MS Rawlinson B. 503), (Dublin, 1951). Lambert McKenna (ed.), Aithdioghluim dána (2 vols, Dublin, ITS, 1939 text, 1940 translation). W.M. Hennessy (ed.), The Annals of Loch Cé (2 vols, London, Rolls Series, 1871, repr. Dublin, IMC, 1939). Analecta Hibernica. W.N. Hancock et al. (eds), Ancient laws of Ireland (6 vols, Dublin, 1865–1901). Denis Murphy (ed.), The Annals of Clonmacnoise (Dublin, 1896, repr. Felinfach, 1993). A.M. Freeman (ed.), Annála Connacht, the Annals of Connacht (Dublin, 1944). Richard Butler (ed.), Jacobi Grace Kilkenniensis, Annales Hiberniae (Dublin, 1842). John O’Donovan (ed.), ‘The Annals of Ireland, from the year 1443 to 1468, translated from the Irish by … Duald MacFirbis’ in Miscellany of the Irish Archaeological Society, 1 (Dublin, 1846), pp 108–302. Whitley Stokes (ed. and trans.), ‘The Annals of Tigernach’ from Rev. Celt. 16, 17 and 18 (1895–7), reprinted as two volumes, Felinfach, 1993, with new continuous pagination added at the foot of each page. My footnotes refer to this new pagination, with original Revue Celtique pagination in square brackets. A.J. Hughes and William Nolan (eds), Armagh: history and society (Dublin, 2001). Bartholomew MacCarthy (ed.), The Annals of Ulster, vols 2, 3 & 4 (Dublin, 1893, 1895 and 1901). Osborn Bergin, Irish bardic poetry, ed. David Greene and Fergus Kelly (Dublin, 1970). Edel Bhreathnach (ed.), The kingship and landscape of Tara (Dublin, 2005). Ludwig Bieler (ed.), The Patrician texts in the Book of Armagh (Dublin, 1979). D.A. Binchy (ed.), Críth Gablach (Dublin, 1941). W.M. Hennessy and D.H. Kelly (eds), The Book of Fenagh (Dublin, 1875; repr. IMC, 1939).

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14 Breatnach, Companion Breifne Byrne, Irish kings

Cal. Carew MSS

Cal. close rolls Cal. pat. rolls Carpenter, ‘The pilgrim from Catalonia’

CDI Chart, Reg. Swayne

CIH CMCS Corp. Gen. Hib. Curtis, Richard II Derry Hist. & Soc. DIAS DIB

DiD Donegal Hist. & Soc. Down Hist. & Soc. Early Statutes I–IV

Abbreviations Liam Breatnach, A companion to the Corpus iuris Hibernici (Dublin, 2005). Breifne: Journal of Cumann Seanchais Bhreifne (Breifne Historical Society). F.J. Byrne, Irish kings and high-kings (London, 1973, reprinted with original pagination, author’s corrections in prefixed additional pages, Dublin, 2001). J.S. Brewer and William Bullen (eds), Calendar of the Carew manuscripts preserved in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth (6 vols, London, 1867–73). Calendar of the close rolls, 1272–1485 (42 vols, London, 1892– 1954). Calendar of the patent rolls, 1232–1485 (51 vols, London 1891– 1916). Dorothy Carpenter, ‘The pilgrim from Catalonia/Aragon: Ramon de Perellós’ in Michael Haren and Yolande de Pontfarcy (eds), The medieval pilgrimage to St Patrick’s Purgatory: Lough Derg and the European tradition (Enniskillen, 1988), pp 99–119. H.S. Sweetman (ed.), Calendar of documents relating to Ireland 1171–[1307] (5 vols, London, Public Record Office, 1875–86). D.A. Chart (ed.), The register of John Swayne, archbishop of Armagh and primate of Ireland, 1418–1439 [calendar] (Belfast, 1935). D.A. Binchy (ed.), Corpus iuris Hibernici (6 vols, Dublin, 1978). Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies/Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies (title change from Winter 1993). M.A. O’Brien (ed.), Corpus genealogiarum Hiberniae (Dublin, 1962). Edmund Curtis, Richard II in Ireland 1394–5 and the submissions of the Irish chiefs (Oxford, 1927). Gerard O’Brien (ed.), Derry and Londonderry: history and society (Dublin, 1999). Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. James McGuire and James Quinn (eds), Dictionary of Irish biography (9 vols, Dublin and Cambridge, 2009). Also available at www.dibcambridge.org Láimhbheartach MacCionaith (eag.), Dioghluim dána (Baile Átha Cliath, 1938). William Nolan, Liam Ronayne and Mairéad Dunlevy (eds), Donegal: history and society (Dublin, 1995). Lindsay Proudfoot (ed.), Down: history and society (Dublin, 1997). H.F. Berry (ed.), Statutes and ordinances and acts of the parliament of Ireland: King John to Henry V, idem, Statute rolls of the parliament of Ireland: reign of King Henry VI (being volume II of the Irish Record Office series of early statutes); idem, Statute rolls of the parliament of Ireland: 1st to 12th years of the reign of King Edward IV (being volume III of the Irish Record Office series of early statutes); idem, Statute rolls of the parliament of Ireland: 12th and 13th to the 21st and 22nd years of the reign of King Edward IV

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Abbreviations

15

(being volume IV of the Irish Record Office series of early statutes) (Dublin, HM Stationery Office, 1907, 1910, 1914, 1939). Éigse Éigse: a Journal of Irish Studies (published for the NUI). Emania Emania: Bulletin of the Navan Research Group. Eng. & Ire. ed. Lydon James Lydon (ed.), England and Ireland in the later Middle Ages: essays in honour of Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven (Dublin, 1981). Ériu Ériu, founded as the Journal of the School of Irish Learning (RIA). Etchingham, Church Colmán Etchingham, Church organization in Ireland, AD650– organization 1000 (Maynooth, 1999). Féilsgríbhinn Eóin Mhic John Ryan (ed.), Féilsgríbhinn Eóin Mhic Néill: essays and studies Néill presented to Professor Eoin MacNeill (Dublin, 1940; repr. 1995). Fermanagh Hist. & Soc. E.M. Murphy and W.J. Roulston (eds), Fermanagh: history and society (Dublin, 2004). Flanagan, Ir. royal Marie Thérèse Flanagan, Irish royal charters: texts and contexts charters (Oxford, 2005). Flanagan, Irish society Marie Thérèse Flanagan, Irish society, Anglo-Norman settlers, Angevin kingship: interactions in Ireland in the late twelfth century (Oxford, 1989). Foras Feasa David Comyn and P.S. Dinneen (eds), Foras feasa ar Éirinn: The history of Ireland by Geoffrey Keating (4 vols, London, 1902–14). Gilbert, Chart. St Mary’s J.T. Gilbert (ed.), Chartularies of St Mary’s Abbey, Dublin … and Annals of Ireland (2 vols, London, 1884). Gilbert, Facsimiles J.T. Gilbert (ed.), Facsimiles of the national manuscripts of Ireland (4 vols, Dublin, 1874–84). Gwynn & Hadcock, Aubrey Gwynn and R.N. Hadcock, Medieval religious houses: Medieval religious houses Ireland (London, 1970). IHS Irish Historical Studies. IMC Irish Manuscripts Commission. Ir. Texts J. Fraser, P. Grosjean and J.G. O’Keeffe (eds), Irish texts, fasc. I–IV (London, 1931–4). ITS Irish Texts Society. Jaski, Early Irish kingship Bart Jaski, Early Irish kingship and succession (Dublin, 2000). Johnes, Froissart Thomas Johnes (trans.), Chronicles of England, France, Spain … from the latter part of the reign of Edward II to the coronation of Henry IV by Sir John Froissart (2 vols, London, 1857). JRSAI Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland – volumes numbered continuously to include: 1849–53 Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society; 1854–5 Proceedings and Transactions of the Kilkenny and South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society; 1856–67 Journal of the Kilkenny and South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society; 1868–9 Journal of the Historical and Archaeological Association of Ireland; 1870–89 Journal of the Royal Historical and Archaeological Association of Ireland. Kelly, Audacht Fergus Kelly (ed.), Audacht Morainn (Dublin, 1976). Kelly, Early Irish law Fergus Kelly, A guide to early Irish law (Dublin, 1988). Knott, Tadhg Dall Eleanor Knott (ed.), The bardic poems of Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn (1550–1591) (2 vols, London, 1922, 1926). Mac Airt & Mac Niocaill, Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill (eds), The Annals of Annals of Ulster Ulster to 1131 (Dublin, 1983). McCone, Pagan past Kim McCone, Pagan past and Christian present in early Irish literature (Maynooth, 1990).

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16 McCone & Simms, Progress The medieval pilgrimage

Abbreviations

Kim McCone and Katharine Simms (eds), Progress in medieval Irish studies (Maynooth, 1996). Michael Haren and Yolande de Pontfarcy (eds), The medieval pilgrimage to St Patrick’s Purgatory: Lough Derg and the European tradition (Enniskillen, 1988). Miller & Power, Liam Miller and Eileen Power (eds), Holinshed’s Irish chronicle Holinshed’s Ir. Chron. 1577: the historie of Irelande from the first habitation thereof, vnto the yeare 1509. Collected by Raphaell Holinshed, & continued till the yeare 1547 by Richarde Stanyhurst (Dublin, 1979). Misc. Ir. Ann. Séamus Ó hInnse (ed.), Miscellaneous Irish annals (Dublin 1947). Monaghan Hist. & Soc. P.J. Duffy and Éamonn Ó Ciardha (eds), Monaghan: history and society (Dublin, 2017). Morley, Ire. under Eliz. Henry Morley (ed.), Ireland under Elizabeth and James I (London, & Jas I 1890). Mullally, Deeds of the Evelyn Mullally (ed.), The deeds of the Normans in Ireland: La Normans geste des Engleis en Yrlande, a new edition of the chronicle formerly known as The song of Dermot and the earl (Dublin, 2002). NHI 1 Dáibhí Ó Croínín (ed.), A new history of Ireland, i: Prehistoric and early Ireland (Oxford, 2005). NHI 2 Art Cosgrove (ed.), A new history of Ireland, ii: Medieval Ireland, 1169–1534 (Oxford, 1987). NHI 3 T.W. Moody, F.X. Martin and F.J. Byrne (eds), A new history of Ireland, iii: Early modern Ireland, 1534–1691 (Oxford, 1976). NHI 9 T.W. Moody, F.X. Martin, F.J. Byrne (eds), A new history of Ireland, ix: Maps, genealogies, lists: a companion to Irish history part 2 (Oxford, 1984). Nicholls, ‘The register Kenneth Nicholls, ‘The register of Clogher’, Clogher Record, 7 of Clogher’ (1969–72), 361–431. NLI National Library of Ireland. NUI National University of Ireland. Ó Ceallaigh, Gleanings Séamus Ó Ceallaigh, Gleanings from Ulster history (Cork, 1951, enlarged reprint, with contributions from Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Niamh Whitfield and Nollaig Ó Muraíle with unchanged pagination, Draperstown, Ballinascreen Historical Society, 1994). O’Donovan, Tribes of John O’Donovan (ed.), The tribes of Ireland: a satire by Aenghus Ireland O’Daly (Dublin, 1852). O’Grady, Caithréim S.H. O’Grady (ed.), Caithréim Thoirdhealbhaigh (2 vols, London, ITS, 1929). O’Grady, Silva Gadelica S.H. O’Grady (ed.), Silva Gadelica I–XXXI: A collection of tales in Irish with extracts illustrating persons and places (2 vols, London and Edinburgh, 1892). O’Grady & Flower, S.H. O’Grady and Robin Flower, Catalogue of Irish manuscripts Cat. Ir. MSS in the British Museum (3 vols, London, 1926, reprinted as Catalogue of Irish manuscripts in the British Library [formerly British Museum], 3 vols, Dublin, 1992). O’Meara, Gerald of Wales J.J. O’Meara (ed.), Gerald of Wales: The history and topography of Ireland (rev. ed., London, 1982). Ó Muraíle, The Gt Bk Nollaig Ó Muraíle, The great book of Irish genealogies (Leabhar of Ir. Gen. Mór na nGenealach) compiled (1645–66) by Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh (6 vols, Dublin, 2003).

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Abbreviations Orpen, Normans

17

G.H. Orpen, Ireland under the Normans (4 volumes, Oxford, vols 1–2, 1911, vols 3–4, 1920; reprinted as single volume, with intro. by Seán Duffy and new continuous pagination [given here in square brackets], original page nos. retained in margins, Dublin, 2005). Orpen, Song of Dermot G.H. Orpen (ed.), The song of Dermot and the earl (Oxford, 1892). O’Sullivan, Hospitality C.M. O’Sullivan, Hospitality in medieval Ireland, 900–1500 (Dublin, 2004). Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire. A.J. Otway-Ruthven, A history of medieval Ireland (London, 1968). Oxford DNB H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford dictionary of national biography (60 vols, Oxford 2004). Also available at www.oxforddnb.com Plummer, Bethada Charles Plummer (ed.), Bethada náem nÉrenn (2 vols, Oxford, Náem nÉrenn 1922). Plummer, Vit. Sanct. Hib. Charles Plummer (ed.), Vitae sanctorum Hiberniae (2 vols, Oxford, 1910). PRIA Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Quigley & Roberts, W.G.H. Quigley and E.F.D. Roberts (eds), Registrum Iohannis Reg. Mey Mey: the register of John Mey, archbishop of Armagh, 1443–1456 (Belfast, 1972). Regions and rulers David Edwards (ed.), Regions and rulers in Ireland, 1100–1650: essays for Kenneth Nicholls (Dublin, 2004). Rep. DKPRI Report of the deputy keeper of the public records in Ireland. Rev. Celt. Revue Celtique. RIA Royal Irish Academy. RIA Dictionary E.G. Quin (ed.), Dictionary of the Irish language based mainly on Old and Middle Irish materials (Compact edition, Dublin, RIA, 1998). Also available online as eDIL (Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language) at www.dil.ie Rot. Canc. Hib. [Edward Tresham, ed.], Rotulorum patentium et clausorum cancellarie Hibernie calendarium, Hen. II–Hen. VII (Dublin, 1828); also online at https://www.tcd.ie/CISS/chanceryrolls.php (CIRCLE project) with English translations of calendar entries, and in many cases expanded summaries, or full texts and digital images of manuscripts. Rymer, Foedera Thomas Rymer (ed.), Foedera, conventiones etc. revised Adam Clarke et al. (4 vols, London, 1816–20). Scott & Martin, A.B. Scott and F.X. Martin (eds), Expugnatio Hibernica: The Expugnatio conquest of Ireland, by Giraldus Cambrensis (Dublin, 1978). Simms, From kings to Katharine Simms, From kings to warlords: the changing political warlords structure of Gaelic Ireland in the later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1987, repr. 2000). Simms, ‘Gaelic warfare’ Katharine Simms, ‘Gaelic warfare in the Middle Ages’ in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A military history of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), pp 99–115. Simms, ‘The barefoot Katharine Simms, ‘The barefoot kings: literary image and reality kings’ in later medieval Ireland’ in Erin Boon, A.J. McMullen & Natasha Sumner (eds), Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 30 (2010) (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2011), 1–21.

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18 Smith, Reg. Fleming Smith, Reg. Sweteman Spenser, A View State papers, Hen. VIII, pt 3

Sughi, Reg. Octaviani

TCD Tyrone Hist. & Soc. UJA Walsh, Beatha Aodha Ruaidh

Walsh, Ir. men of learning Williams, Poems of Gilla Brighde ZCP

Abbreviations Brendan Smith (ed.), The register of Nicholas Fleming, archbishop of Armagh, 1404–1416 (Dublin, 2003). Brendan Smith (ed.), The register of Milo Swetemen, archbishop of Armagh, 1361–1380 (Dublin, 1996). Edmund Spenser, A view of the state of Ireland, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford, 1997). State papers published under the authority of His Majesty’s Commission, vol. 2, King Henry VIII, part 3, Correspondence between the governments of England and Ireland, 1515–1538 (London, 1834). M.A. Sughi (ed.), Registrum Octaviani, alias Liber Niger: the register of Octavian de Palatio, archbishop of Armagh, 1478–1513 (2 vols, Dublin, IMC, 1999). Trinity College Dublin. Charles Dillon and H.A. Jefferies (eds), Tyrone: history and society (Dublin, 2000). Ulster Journal of Archaeology. Paul Walsh (ed.), Beatha Aodha Ruaidh Uí Dhomhnaill: The life of Aodh Ruadh O Domhnaill transcribed from the Book of Lughaidh Ó Clérigh (2 vols, London, ITS, 1948, 1957, text & trans. vol. 1; notes and additional material vol. 2). Paul Walsh, Irish men of learning, ed. Colm Ó Lochlainn (Dublin, 1947). N.J.A. Williams (ed.), The poems of Giolla Brighde Mac Con Midhe (Dublin, ITS, 1980). Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie

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SECTION ONE

Political History

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Introduction

WHY FOCUS ON ULSTER?

Nowadays, medieval Gaelic Ulster1 is virtually invisible. Physical evidence from the four centuries stretching between the invasion of the Anglo-Norman baron John de Courcy (1177) and the Plantation (1610) is rare, apart from remains of Anglo-Norman castles and sea-ports along the coasts of Antrim and Down. From almost any hill in the province, you may see archaeological monuments dating from before the Normans: neolithic passage graves or standing stones, ruins of early Christian churches, crannógs2 or ringforts.3 You may also see houses and fortifications dating from the seventeenth-century Ulster plantation. Yet medieval castles are few and far between, fewer than in other parts of Ireland,4 and there are no other signs of secular settlements from this period. The flimsy fabric of wattle and daub, of which most dwellings were then made,5 leaves so little trace that some archaeologists considered it impossible to know where to begin digging, though others now regard this view as overly pessimistic.6 For all that it left little physical trace, Gaelic Ulster was once a vigorous, confident society, whose members fought and feasted, sang and prayed. It maintained schools of poets, physicians, historians and lawyers, whose studies were conducted largely in their own Gaelic (Early Modern Irish) language, 1 Throughout the book ‘Ulster’ will be used to signify the area covered by the modern ninecounty province, whereas Ulaid will be reserved for the population group who claimed to have ruled the whole province in prehistory, but who in historic times were confined to the Antrim– Down area. 2 Crannógs, or artificial islands on lakes, were prestige residences typically constructed in the early Christian period in Ireland, although a few date back to the Iron Age and many continued to be occupied in the late medieval and early modern period. See Gabriel Cooney and Eoin Grogan, Irish prehistory: a social perspective (Dublin, 1994), pp 194–5; K.D. O’Conor, The archaeology of medieval rural settlement in Ireland (Dublin, 1998), pp 79–84. 3 The majority of archaeologists would place the construction of earthen or drystone ringforts before c.AD1000. While there is some evidence for continued occupation of individual sites into the high Middle Ages, it is not as common as in the case of crannógs. See O’Conor, Archaeology, pp 89–94. 4 See ‘Distribution map of tower-houses’ in T.B. Barry, ‘Rural settlement in medieval Ireland’ in T.B. Barry (ed.), A history of settlement in Ireland (London and New York, 2000), pp 110–23, at p. 120. 5 P.S. Robinson, ‘Vernacular housing in Ulster in the seventeenth century’, Ulster Folklife, 25 (1979), 1–28; see also Kevin Danaher, ‘Primitive structures used as dwellings, 16th to 19th centuries’, JRSAI, 75 (1945), 204–52. 6 P.J. Duffy, David Edwards and Elizabeth FitzPatrick (eds), Gaelic Ireland: land, lordship and

21

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rather than in the dead Latin of medieval schools elsewhere in Europe. Gaelic Ulster may have left few visible monuments after the Norman invasion, but it has left us numerous literary texts and historical records in the Irish language.7 The medieval province presents something of a puzzle to modern eyes: the Gaelic-speaking inhabitants of western and mid-Ulster were perfectly familiar with Anglo-Irish and Scottish money, and used these coins to pay foreign merchants, but they continued to trade among themselves by bartering livestock, foodstuffs and cloth.8 They visited the towns of their Anglo-Irish neighbours, sometimes to parley, sometimes to drink in their taverns, sometimes on pilgrimage.9 Gaelic pilgrims even travelled abroad to towns such as Compostela in Spain,10 to the ‘Eternal City’ of Rome, and to Nazareth and Jerusalem in the Holy Land,11 but apart from O’Reilly (Ó Raigillig/Ó Ragallaig) of Cavan, the Ulster chieftains founded no towns of their own. Why? To some extent, this failure to urbanize is symptomatic of a society based on subsistence agriculture. Consuming all they produced,12 the Ulstermen had little in the way of surplus with which to trade, or profits to provide capital for construction or industry. Nevertheless the counter-example of the O’Reilly chiefs who, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, licensed a market at Cavan, launched a local coinage and offered free commercial sites in Cavan town to a merchant prepared to finance the paving of one of their streets,13 indicates that the underdevelopment of the Ulster economy in the high Middle Ages was not inevitable, but could be partly attributed to the mentality of the province’s rulers.14 A Catalan knight passing through Ulster in 1397, while on pilgrimage to Loch Derg, reported that the Great O’Neill of Tyrone (Ó Néill of Tír settlement (Dublin, 2001), ‘Introduction’, pp 57–61. 7  See Katharine Simms, Medieval Gaelic sources, Maynooth Research Guides for Irish Local History 13 (Dublin, 2009). 8 P.S. Robinson, The plantation of Ulster: British settlement in an Irish landscape, 1600–1670 (Dublin, 1984; repr. Belfast, 1994), p. 37; Katharine Simms, ‘Guesting and feasting in Gaelic Ireland’, JRSAI, 108 (1978), 67–100: 67; eadem, ‘The concordat between Primate John Mey and Henry O’Neill, 1455’, Archivium Hibernicum, 34 (1976/7), 71–82: 73. 9 AU 3, pp 160–1 (Trim, county Meath); Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 112–13 (Carrickfergus, county Antrim); Early Statutes II, pp 176, 340–7 (Trim and Navan, county Meath); James Graves (ed.), A roll of the proceedings of the king’s council in Ireland (London, 1877), p. 191 (Drogheda, county Louth). 10 Roger Stalley, ‘Sailing to Santiago’ in J. Bradley (ed.), Settlement and society in medieval Ireland (Kilkenny 1988), pp 397–420, at pp 403–4; M.J. Haren, ‘Select documents XXXIX: the religious outlook of a Gaelic lord: a new light on Thomas Óg Maguire’, IHS, 25 (1986), 195–7. 11  Gerard Murphy, ‘Two Irish poems written from the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century’, Éigse, 7 (1953–5), 71–9: 71–4; Brian Ó Cuív, ‘Poem on the infancy of Christ’, Éigse, 15 (1973–4), 93–102. 12 Sir John Davies, ‘Letter to the earl of Salisbury touching the state of Monaghan, Fermanagh and Cavan ... 1607’ in Morley, Ire. under Eliz. & Jas I, pp 369–70. 13 Early Statutes II, pp 90–1, 450–1; Early Statutes IV, pp xliv, 818– 21; Michael Dolley and W.A. Seaby, ‘Le money del O Raylly’, The British Numismatic Journal, 36 (1967), 114–17; Gearóid Mac Niocaill (ed.), ‘Cairt ó Mhaolmhordha Ó Raighilligh, 1558’, Breifne, 1 (1959), 134–5; and see Kenneth Nicholls, ‘Gaelic society and economy in the high Middle Ages’ in NHI 2, pp 397–438, at p. 464. 14 Simms, ‘The barefoot kings’.

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Eógain): ‘spoke to me at length, asking me about the Christian kings, especially the kings of France, Aragon and Castile and about their customs and the way they lived. It appeared to me from his words that they consider their own customs to be better than ours and more advantageous than any others in the whole world’.15 The Spartan simplicity of Ulster’s material culture in the high Middle Ages gives a superficial appearance of continuity with early Christian and even Iron Age Celtic culture, shown for example in the tradition of stone carving in the Lough Erne area.16 However, if such conservative resistance to change resulted from cultural choice rather than economic necessity, the reasons for such a choice deserve further investigation. This book explores the neglected history of Gaelic Ulster between the eleventh and early sixteenth centuries, with the aim of shedding further light on its enigmatic society. The first section, on ‘Political History’, provides the reader with a chronological narrative, showing the influence of internal and external political change on the Ulster chieftains, while also illustrating how this northern province related to the rest of Ireland, either as part of the wider whole or, in some cases, taking a different course. The second section, on ‘Culture and Society’, aims to depict the world of Ulster during the Middle Ages, its culture and ideals, the lifestyle and customs of its people. My account is fully footnoted throughout, to guide interested readers towards more specialist studies on aspects of the area and period covered. Any attempt to recreate the society of medieval Ulster has to be subject to available sources.17 There is a notable lack of information on population numbers, taxation or trade figures, since the chiefs kept no administrative records, and the customs returns for Anglo-Irish ports like Ardglass and Carrickfergus are partly lost, and partly destroyed by the catastrophic fire in the Irish Public Record Office in 1922.18 My own work relies heavily on annals, genealogical tracts and verse eulogies, composed by bardic poets and historians working under the patronage of the Gaelic chiefs. Texts such as these form excellent sources for the ideology and culture of the chieftains’ courts, but are less reliable guides to their factual history, inevitably catering to the biases of 15  Carpenter, ‘The pilgrim from Catalonia’, p. 111. 16  Helen Hickey, Images of stone (Belfast, 1976); Helen Lanigan Wood, ‘Early stone figures in Fermanagh’ in Fermanagh Hist. & Soc., pp 33–56, at pp 33–6. 17 On sources for the history of Gaelic Ireland, see Simms, From kings to warlords, Chap. 1; eadem, Medieval Gaelic sources. 18 Herbert Wood, ‘The Public Records of Ireland before and after 1922’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 13 (1930), 17–49; Philomena Connolly, ‘The destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland in 1922: disaster and recovery’ in Michael Duchein (ed.), Memory of the world at risk: archives destroyed, archives reconstituted (Munich, New Providence, London and Paris, 1996), pp 135–46; Ronan Keane, ‘A mass of crumbling ruins: the destruction of the Four Courts in June 1922’ in Caroline Costello (ed.), The Four Courts: 200 years: essays to commemorate the bicentenary of the Four Courts (Dublin, 1996), pp 159–68.

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their patrons.19 Records of foreign observers, Irish churchmen and AngloNorman administrators can be more reliable, though again, allowance must be made for bias, ethnic or ecclesiastical. The main focus of my own research has been the high Middle Ages, the period between 1100 and 1500, for which documentation is thinnest. I have glanced back to the archaeology, history and legends of the early Christian period, to identify the cultural background influencing the medieval rulers, and have followed the end of the Geraldine hegemony into the sixteenth century to assess how far the situation was altered by the Tudor project for reform and reconquest, even before the Ulster plantation. In the second section, dealing with culture and society, when discussing institutions that are known to have existed in Ulster, but are more fully described elsewhere in Ireland, I draw on sources from other provinces, but cautiously, because of Ulster’s distinctive regional character, which forms a major part of the following study. I have tried to ensure that in the case of any custom detailed in earlier or later sources I have found at least some hint of its practice in the high Middle Ages, sufficient to warrant an assumption of continuity.

H O W A R C H A I C WA S G A E L I C S O C I E T Y ? K I N G S H I P, L AW A N D T H E LEARNED CLASSES

Looking at medieval Ulster with the benefit of hindsight, it is a fact that both in the twelfth century and in the sixteenth, writers used the argument that Gaelic society was archaic and underdeveloped to justify invasion and colonization by Cambro-Normans, English and Scots as a ‘civilizing’ process, and that these were the same arguments that were applied in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the invasion and colonization of North America, and subsequently used in colonizing contexts around the world in later centuries.20 The twelfth-century chronicler of the Cambro-Norman invasion, Giraldus Cambrensis or Gerald of Wales, at once a respected scholar and a close kinsman of some of the leading invaders, notoriously alleged:

19 See Katharine Simms, ‘Bardic poetry as a historical source’ in Tom Dunne (ed.), The writer as witness: Historical Studies XVI (Cork, 1987), pp 58–75. 20 Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales: 1145–1223 (Oxford, 1982), pp 158–77; idem, Gerald of Wales and the ethnographic imagination (Cambridge, 2013), pp 10–16; R.R. Davies, Domination and conquest: the experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 1100–1300 (Cambridge, 1990.), pp 9–12; D.B. Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, NY, 1966); Nagamitsu Miura, John Locke and the Native Americans: early English liberalism and its colonial reality (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2013), pp 21– 36, 47–74; E.W. Said, Orientalism: Western conceptions of the Orient (London, 1991), pp 14, 206–7, 349.

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[The Irish] are a wild and inhospitable people. They live on beasts only, and live like beasts. They have not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral living. While man usually progresses from the woods to the fields, and from the fields to settlements and communities of citizens, this people despises work on the land, has little use for the money-making of towns, condemns the rights and privileges of citizenship, and desires neither to abandon, nor lose respect for, the life which it has been accustomed to lead in the woods and countryside.21 Even within his own writings, Gerald betrays that his description of the pastoralism of Irish society was an overstatement, when in his chronicle of the actual events of the Norman invasion of Ireland, Expugnatio Hibernica, he remarks: Miles de Cogan … crossed the river Shannon and boldly overran Connacht … But the men of Connacht set fire to the cities and villages (urbibus undiqe et villis) in all parts of the province, and destroyed by burning them all the provisions which they could not conceal in underground vaults, and also burned down the churches … finding the countryside had been stripped of all kinds of food, they returned to the Shannon.22 This passage also, of course, highlights the absurdity of Gerald’s complaint that the invaders found the Irish ‘inhospitable’. A more fundamental misjudgement grew out of Gerald’s assumption, which was a widely accepted orthodoxy inherited from ancient Greece and Rome, that civilization was the hall-mark of a society based on town-life, and that societies who had not developed an urban economy were barbarian also in other ways, illiterate, lawless, anarchic. Owing to its position outside the Roman empire, but inside the Christian church, Ireland’s development did not follow the neat pattern of progress classical authors prescribed. The church schools of early medieval Ireland, together with those of the scarcely more urbanized AngloSaxon England, were in a position to send out learned clerics who played a significant role in educating, if not ‘civilizing’, the Franks and Germans in the seventh to ninth centuries.23 21  O’Meara, Gerald of Wales, pp 101–2. 22  Scott & Martin, Expugnatio, pp 182–3. 23 Ludwig Bieler, Ireland, harbinger of the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1963), and see idem, ‘The Island of Scholars’ in Richard Sharpe (ed.), Ireland and the culture of early medieval Europe (London, 1987), Section VII. More exaggerated claims were made by Henri Daniel-Rops, The miracle of Ireland (Dublin and London, 1960), and Thomas Cahill, How the Irish saved civilization: the untold story of Ireland’s heroic role from the fall of Rome to the rise of medieval Europe (London, 1995).

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Even before the advent of the Christian church to Ireland, a comparison of classical authors’ description of Gaulish society in the first century BC with the later assertions of early medieval Irish writers suggests that like the Celtic Gauls, the early Irish in pagan times accorded high social status and considerable economic support to a professional learned class who may already by the fifth century AD have been divided into druids, poets and judges.24 The privileged status of the druids was rapidly taken over by the Christian clergy, and the druids themselves, having lingered for a century or two on the fringes of Irish society, eventually became obsolete.25 However, Irish poets and judges were able to combine their traditional high status and learning not merely with the new Christian religion, but in many cases with ordination as clerics and/or monks, and to continue to practise their skills inside the church schools using written texts in both Irish and Latin.26 This situation resulted in Ireland’s unique contribution to European culture, its extensive collection of texts on customary law. The laws of early medieval European peoples who lived outside the scope of the Roman empire had many features in common, reflecting these nations’ common derivation from one ancestral group of proto-Indo-Europeans.27 Early Irish law texts, like the ‘barbarian’ law-codes in the rest of western Europe, clearly showed influence from the Roman civil code and the decrees of church synods operating on the body of inherited customary law,28 but whereas the other customary law texts were normally in the form of royal decrees, only the Irish law schools produced detailed descriptive tracts for the education of judges, glossed and commented on in the manner of schools of canon and civil law elsewhere in Europe.29 Just as the civil law code of the sixth-century emperor Justinian continued to be studied, glossed and commented on into the sixteenth century and beyond, so the seventh- to ninth-century Old Irish law tracts continued to be studied by apprentice judges in Ireland into the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and it was once thought that this antiquarianism was a brake on development in Gaelic society, that as the texts of the law tracts were preserved unchanged, 24 McCone, Pagan past, pp 84–6. 25 Ibid., pp 220–3; Richard Sharpe, ‘Hiberno-Latin laicus, Irish láech and the devil’s men’, Ériu, 30 (1979), 75–92. 26 McCone, Pagan past, pp 22–8; T.M. Charles-Edwards, ‘The context and uses of literacy in early Christian Ireland’ in Huw Pryce (ed.), Literacy in medieval Celtic societies (Cambridge, 1998), pp 62–82; Donnchadh Ó Corráin, ‘Nationality and kingship in pre-Norman Ireland’ in T.W. Moody (ed.), Historical Studies XI: nationality and the pursuit of national independence (Belfast, 1978), pp 1–35, at pp 14–16. 27 See D.A. Binchy, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon kingship (Oxford, 1970), pp 3–7. 28 Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Liam Breatnach and Aidan Breen, ‘The laws of the Irish’, Peritia, 3 (1984), 382–438; Katherine Fischer Drew, Law and society in early medieval Europe: studies in legal history (London, 1988); P.D. King, Law and society in the Visigothic kingdom (Cambridge, 1972); Bart Jaski, ‘Marriage laws in Ireland and on the Continent in the early Middle Ages’ in Christine Meek and Katharine Simms (eds), ‘The fragility of her sex’?: medieval Irishwomen in their European context (Dublin, 1996), pp 16–42. 29 Kelly, Early Irish

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Introduction

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so  the social institutions remained unchanging also.30 However, the texts in  Justinian’s Code could be made to justify all manner of subsequent developments in European society,31 and similarly the commentators on the Old Irish or ‘Brehon’ law tracts were perfectly capable of adapting the basic principles of the law to changing circumstances.32 Besides its continued use of Old Irish law tracts containing a scholarly version of customary law, another ‘archaic’ feature of Gaelic society up to the sixteenth century was the small scale of its kingdoms. Ireland’s multitude of minor local kings was quite a normal political system in fifth- and sixth-century Europe, among the early Anglo-Saxons, for example, or the Franks before the rise of King Clovis.33 Even in Ireland the system slowly evolved as time went by, although the local petty kingdom, or túath, long retained its identity as the basic political unit, a community of landowning families under a single ruler, occupying a territory so confined that all freeholders within its borders could easily travel in one day from their homes to hold council or muster for war at their traditional field or hill of assembly. The sixteenth-century poet Edmund Spenser, who was also a plantation-owner in Munster, was interested to observe parallels between these gatherings of local communities (dála, ‘meetings’, or óenaig, loosely rendered ‘fairs’) and what he considered Anglo-Saxon folk-moots must have been like.34 The clear implication is that he considered Gaelic political organization archaic. Although the corpus of the Old Irish law tracts uniformly refers to the túath as the primary political unit in Irish society, when we turn to actual territorial divisions in Ireland, we find túath is an elastic term. In the former O’Brien kingdom of Túadmuman, ‘Thomond’ or north Munster (approximately counties Clare, Limerick and Tipperary), the word túath became applied to a small fiscal or administrative unit, sometimes identical with a later parish,35 while the basic law, pp 225–41; Breatnach, Companion, pp 92–9. 30 See, for example, W.L. Warren, ‘The interpretation of twelfth-century Irish history’ in J.C. Beckett (ed.), Historical Studies 7 (London, 1969), pp 1–19, at p. 6; G.A. Hayes-McCoy, ‘Gaelic society in Ireland in the late sixteenth century’ in G.A. Hayes-McCoy (ed.), Historical Studies 4 (London, 1963), pp 45– 61. 31 ‘For debates about sovereignty the Digest could supply proponents of autocracy with the brocard that the emperor was not bound by statutes (princeps legibus solutus est, D. 1.3.31) and republicans with the proposition that he should profess himself to be subject to them (digna vox maiestate regnantis legibus alligatum se principi profiteri, c.1.14.4)’, David Johnston, Roman law in context (Cambridge, 1999), p. 135. 32 Katharine Simms, ‘The contents of later commentaries on the Brehon law tracts’, Ériu, 49 (1998), 23–40. 33 J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic kingship in England and on the Continent (Oxford, 1971), pp 16–21; W.A. Chaney, The cult of kingship in Anglo-Saxon England (Manchester, 1970), pp 7–17; Guy Halsall, Barbarian migrations and the Roman West, 376–568 (Cambridge, 2007), pp 121, 125; Ian Wood, ‘Kings, kingdoms and consent’ in P.H. Sawyer and I.N. Wood (eds), Early medieval kingship (Leeds, 1977), pp 9–10, 19–20, 28. 34 Spenser, A View, p. 79. On óenaig see below, Chap. 13. 35 In the ‘Office of Thomond’ (1585) out of nine baronies in all, the barony of ‘Tullagh Naspill’ contains 8 territories whose names begin with ‘toe’ or ‘togh’ (=túath), the

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political unit was known as a tricha-cét or ‘cantred’,36 possibly reflecting an administrative reorganization by the modernizing O’Brien high-kings. In Ulster the túatha were larger, and a number of the petty kingdoms there have since bequeathed their names to ‘baronies’, administrative subdivisions of the counties created during the Tudor and Stuart re-conquest. Some of the clearest examples include the kingdoms of Tellach Echach, and Tellach Donnchada, represented by the baronies of Tullyhaw and Tullyhunco in county Cavan; Dartraige Coininnse and Tricha-Cét Airgiall, the forerunners of the baronies of Dartree and Trough in Monaghan; and Fir Luirg, represented by the barony of Lurg in Fermanagh. In this province the dimensions of named tuatha, local petty kingdoms or lordships, may relate to the typical tuath of the Old Irish law tracts. There is some difference of opinion among historical geographers as to how helpful it is to work backwards from modern baronies37 in seeking to locate the political boundaries of pre-plantation Ulster. Nevertheless, a map of modern barony boundaries can be helpful to establish a sense of the physical scale of the túatha and cantreds, the basic political units that formed the building blocks of government in medieval Ulster. The Maguire (Mág Uidir) kings of Fir Manach, for example, were described as ruling the ‘Seven Túatha of Fir Manach’, and the present county of Fermanagh is reckoned to contain seven-and-a-half baronies.38 (See Fig. 1) barony of ‘Dengenivegyn’ has 7, the barony of ‘Dorcomran’ or ‘Corcumroe’ has 4, the barony of ‘Borren’ has 2, and the barony of ‘Tullagh Ida’ has 4. This contrasts with the ‘Office of Clanrickard and Ireconnaught’ which shows just three further territorial sub-divisions with a ‘túath’ element in the border area of south Galway, that is, two in the barony of Clare and one in the barony of Leitrim, but none at all in West or Iar-Connacht, where the most frequent designation for territorial sub-divisions of a similar size is ‘baile’ (‘town’ or ‘townland’), A.M. Freeman (ed.), The Compossicion Booke of Conought (Dublin, 1936), pp 7–10, 47–53. See also James Frost, The history and topography of the county of Clare (Dublin, 1893), pp 95, 194; Charles Plummer (ed.), ‘The Miracles of Senan’, ZCP, 11:1 (1914), 1–35: 8–9. On varying sizes of tuatha see also Paul MacCotter, Medieval Ireland: territorial, political and economic divisions (Dublin, 2008), p. 48. 36 C.A. Empey, ‘The settlement of the kingdom of Limerick’ in Lydon (ed.), Eng. & Ire., pp 1–25, at pp 2–4; James Hogan, ‘The trícha cét and related land-measures’, PRIA, 38C (1929), 148–235; MacCotter, Medieval Ireland, passim. 37 Thom Kerr and Finbar McCormick, ‘Early secular settlement in county Fermanagh’ in Fermanagh Hist. & Soc., pp 57–75, at pp 64–5. Recent detailed investigations (Kay Muhr, ‘Territories, people and place-names in county Armagh’ in Armagh Hist. & Soc., pp 295–331; Domhnall Mac Giolla Easpaig, ‘Placenames and early settlement in county Donegal’ in Donegal Hist. & Soc., pp 149–82; Brian Lacey, ‘County Derry in the early historic period’ in Derry Hist. & Soc., pp 115–48; Ailbhe MacShamhráin, ‘The making of Tír nÉogain: Cenél nÉogain and the Airgialla from the sixth to the eleventh centuries’ in Tyrone Hist. & Soc., pp 55–84) have served to demonstrate not only that, in the words of Séamus Ó Ceallaigh, ‘these English baronies were, in the main, arbitrary divisions, being each, usually, a conglomeration of old Irish territories’ (Ó Ceallaigh, Gleanings, p. 48) but also that the earlier native Irish units themselves fluctuated down the years, not only as regards the details of their boundaries, but in the identity of the dynasties which ruled over them and their political affiliations. 38 Kerr

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Fig. 1 Modern barony boundaries in the north of Ireland.

Long before the era of the Ulster plantation, many of these little túatha were permanently grouped into larger over-kingdoms (like Fir Manach), and their local rulers lost the title of rí or ‘king’ (in Latin documents rex or sometimes regulus, ‘petty king’), being known henceforward as toísech, ‘leader’ or ‘chieftain’ (in Latin dux).39 However, as late as the twelfth to the early fifteenth centuries, the Irish title rí or Latin rex, ‘king’, was still the normal term for the overlords who ruled clusters of four to seven túatha forming a larger area – what had been termed in the law tracts a mórthúath (‘a great-túath’), approximating to the modern Irish counties in scale, though not in the detail of their boundaries. Typically, these territories were composed of a stable inner group of túatha that operated as a and McCormick, ‘Early secular settlement’, p. 59; Peadar Livingstone, The Fermanagh story (Enniskillen, 1969), p. 17; Katharine Simms, ‘Medieval Fermanagh’ in Fermanagh Hist. & Soc., pp 77–103, at pp 84–91. 39 Donncha Ó Corráin, Ireland before the Normans (Dublin, 1972), pp 29–32; Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 11, 34–9. The Latin word dux, originally signifying a military title such as ‘general’ or ‘commander’, became ‘duke’ in English, ‘duc’ in French and was equated to ‘Herzog’ in German, but in Ireland dux or toísech translates as

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unit over centuries, and some outlying areas that were not always under the king’s control. For example, twelfth- or thirteenth-century poems preserved in the Book of Fenagh tell us the original territory of the Cenél Conaill, the dynasty claiming descent from a semi-legendary fifth-century king, Conall, son of Niall of the Nine Hostages, consisted of three cantreds (‘lands’ or tírtha): Tír Luigdech (the ‘land’ of the Cenél Luigdech, ‘the descendants of Lugaid’), stretching from Farsetmore on the river Swilly to Gweedore (approximately the baronies of Kilmacrenan and Boylagh), Tír Boguine from Gweedore to Inver (covered by the modern barony of Banagh), and Tír Áeda (which has given its name to the modern barony of Tirhugh, county Donegal) extending from Inver east to the Barnesmore Gap and south to a certain hazelwood in the neighbourhood of the Erne.40 (See Fig. 1) Later in the thirteenth century, Anglo-Norman charters describe Tír Conaill as composed of four cantreds: two along the sea-coast from ‘Roscule’ to ‘Thethnegall’ (Rosguill to Donegal?) and two inland, stretching from Loch Erne to Cenél Múáin (around Lifford) and from thence up to Derry. This implies that the associated border territory of Tír Énda or Cenél nÉnda, described in the Book of Fenagh as lying east of the Barnesmore Gap and south of Inishowen (thus approximating to the modern Raphoe barony, north and south), was seen by the later thirteenth century as part of Tír Conaill proper. Two further districts, Tír Cairbre described by the Book of Fenagh as stretching westwards from the hazelwood by the Erne to near Ballysadare (its name continued in the modern barony of Carbury, county Sligo) and Inis Eógain (the peninsula of Inishowen, county Donegal), were contested for centuries by kings of Tír Conaill against the counter-claims of the O’Conor (Ó Conchobair) and O’Neill (Ó Néill) kings respectively.41 Similarly, the district of Clann Cellaig (modern barony of Clankelly, county Fermanagh) was regularly in dispute between the kings of Fir Manach and Airgialla (Monaghan area) during the medieval period (see Fig. 1).42 In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such regional kings were subject to the authority of provincial kings (ríg cóiced), literally ‘kings of Fifths [of Ireland]’, although at that time they totalled not five but six, styled respectively ‘king of the North’ (rí an Túaisceirt), ‘king of Tara’ or ‘of Meath’ (rí Temrach, rí Mide), ‘king of the Leinstermen’ (rí Laigen), kings of North and South Munster (rí Túadmuman, rí Desmuman) and king of Connacht (rí Connacht). These, in turn, had been dominated by whichever one of their number attained the precarious eminence of a ‘king of Ireland with opposition’ (rí Érenn co fressabra).43

‘chief ’ or ‘chieftain’. 40 Bk Fen., pp 312–30, 394–8; see Katharine Simms, ‘The Donegal poems in the Book of Fenagh’, Ériu, 58 (2008), 37–53. 41 Gearóid Mac Niocaill (ed.), The Red Book of the Earls of Kildare (Dublin, 1964), no. 129; Katharine Simms, ‘Late medieval Donegal’ in Donegal Hist. & Soc., pp 183–201, at pp 183–6. 42  Simms, ‘Medieval Fermanagh’, p. 90. 43 See below, pp 69, 73.

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By the early thirteenth century, such a hierarchy of kings was seen by other Europeans as an archaic survival, unusual enough to attract comment from the Anglo-Normans. The anonymous author of the ‘Song of Dermot and the Earl’ explained: ‘In Ireland kings were as numerous as earls were elsewhere’.44 Abbot Stephen Lexington, who conducted a visitation of rebellious Cistercian communities in Ireland in 1228, was anxious lest the pope should be unduly impressed by messages of support for the rebel monks from Irish kings and bishops. He assured his ally, the abbot of Clairvaux, that Irish kings were not kings as generally understood in other parts of Europe. They possessed neither castles nor halls, nor even proper houses or harness for their horses. They lived in little huts, made of wattle ‘of the type used by birds when they are moulting’.45 His strictures applied particularly to Donnchad Cairbrech O’Brien (d. 1242), provincial king of Thomond, grandfather of one of the chief Cistercian rebels. Such remarks could be seen as quite ungrateful, since King Donnchad had contributed financially to the Cistercian order’s central funds.46 The Annals of Inisfallen, when noting his death, call him ‘high-king of Thomond’ and remark ‘there was not during his time a better Munsterman, or one more affable, or of greater retinue, or better provided with victuals than he’, while the Four Masters style him ‘tower of the splendour and greatness of the south of Ireland’.47 A controversial article published in 1969 by Professor Warren acknowledged the ‘modernizing’ tendencies of provincial over-kings in the southern part of Ireland, surprisingly contrasting these with Connacht, which he identified as a ‘stronghold of conservatism’.48 This judgement seems to run contrary to recorded innovations of the Connacht high-king, Ruaidri O’Conor, such as his sponsorship of an ‘embryonic university at Armagh’, by his endowment of the lectorship of the Continentally-educated Florentius Ó Gormáin,49 his ‘unprecedented’ decision to be enkinged in the Norse city of Dublin,50 his decision to build ‘a wonderful castle’ (caislén ingantach) in the archiepiscopal see of Tuam,51 his presiding over a great lay and ecclesiastical legislative assembly in 1167 where ‘they passed many good resolutions at this meeting, respecting veneration for churches and clerics, and control of tribes and territories’.52 44 Mullally, Deeds of the Normans, p. 109; Orpen, Song of Dermot, pp 160–1. 45 Barry O’Dwyer, The Conspiracy of Mellifont, 1216–1231 (Dublin, 1970), p. 31; ‘Nam tales reges nec castra nec aulas nec etiam domos tignatas habent aut sellas equorum, sed tabernaculas ex virgis, qualia solent construi auibus ad pennas immutandas’ – P.B. Giesser (ed.), Registrum epistolarum Stephani de Lexinton abbatis de Stanlegia et de Savigniaco, Pars 1 (Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis 2, fasc. 1–4, Roma, 1946), p. 112. 46 G.H. Orpen, ‘Some Irish Cistercian documents’, English Historical Review, 28 (1913), 303–13: 307–8; Flanagan, Ir. royal charters, pp 225–31, 357–61. 47  AI, pp 352–3; AFM 3, pp 304–5 (AD1242). 48  Warren, ‘The interpretation of twelfth-century Irish history’, p. 9. 49 F.J. Byrne, ‘The trembling sod: Ireland in 1169’, NHI 2, pp 1–42, at p. 41. 50 Ailbhe MacShamhráin, ‘Ua Conchobair, Ruaidri (d. 1198)’ in DIB, 9, pp 572–6, at p. 573. 51 Ann. Tig., p. 195 (AD1164). 52 AFM 2, pp 1162–5 (AD1167).

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Somewhat unexpectedly, Warren counted Ruaidri’s rival, Muirchertach MacLaughlin, high-king of the North, among the progressive kings of twelfthcentury Ireland,53 presumably on the basis of his charter to the monks at Newry, and his building activities in Derry.54 It is probable that distinctions between ‘modernizing’ and ‘conservative’ parts of Ireland are misconceived, since the church and the learned classes circulated ideas around the country quite effectively, but if one area of Ireland should be viewed as more conservative than another in the twelfth century, it was probably west Ulster, geographically the most remote from southern England and the Continent, and lacking contact with commercial sea-ports, unlike Connacht, which was linked to the busy centres of Clonmacnoise and Limerick via the river Shannon. West Ulster was the scene of Gerald of Wales’ notorious description of ‘A new and outlandish way of confirming kingship and dominion’.55 Even he, however, did not suggest the rite he described, a simulated mating with a white mare, was a normal kingship ceremony elsewhere in Ireland. The learned poets and clerics of seventh-century Ireland had in a manner invented the ideal pattern of Christian kingship which found acceptance at the court of the Carolingian emperors and through their endorsement spread across western Europe.56 The reality of Irish kingship will be explored in the following chapters.

53 Warren, ‘The interpretation of twelfth-century Irish history’, p. 9. 54 See below, pp 78–9. 55  O’Meara, Gerald of Wales, pp 109–10; see below, p. 291. 56  H.H. Anton, ‘PseudoCyprian: De duodecim abusivis saeculi und sein Einfluss auf den Kontinent, insbesondere auf die karolingischen Fürstenspiegel’ in Heinz Löwe (ed.), Die Iren und Europa im früheren Mittelalter (2 vols, Stuttgart 1982), 2, pp 568–617. See below, pp 249–53.

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CHAPTER

1

Early background: Ulster’s central role in Irish history The modern border, which divides the six counties of Northern Ireland from the twenty-six counties in the Republic, is a consequence of the demographic shifts caused by the Ulster plantation in the early seventeenth century, which introduced a significant Scottish and English settler population. In its turn, that plantation was a reaction to the perceived threat that the military strength and recalcitrance of Ulster’s Gaelic lords posed to the smooth workings of Tudor and Stuart administration. The image of the legendary hero Cú Chulainn, defending Ulster against threatened invasion from the other provinces of Ireland, has provided a literary icon in modern times for Unionists as well as nationalists,1 symbolizing the province’s distinct character. However, from earliest recorded history into the high Middle Ages, Ulster’s political structure, church hierarchy and mythical literature actually served to integrate it closely with the rest of Ireland, through Uí Néill claims to high-kingship of Tara, through the primacy that the church of Armagh asserted over all Ireland, and through the nationwide adoption of the Ulster cycle as Ireland’s foremost literary treasure.

M E D I E VA L U L S T E R ’ S H E R I TA G E F R O M T H E I R O N A G E

Ulster was more geographically isolated than the other provinces, surrounded on three sides by the sea, and with routes to the south intercepted by a necklace of wooded drumlin hills running from South Armagh through Monaghan, Cavan2 and Fermanagh. The defensibility of the whole province against landbased invasions is suggested by the archaeological evidence of Iron Age linear 1 Declan Kiberd, ‘Irish literature and Irish history’ in R.F. Foster (ed.), The Oxford illustrated history of Ireland (Oxford, 1989), pp 273–337, at p. 278; Brian Lambkin, ‘The Ulster cycle, the Navan Centre and the improvement of community relations in Northern Ireland’ in J.P. Mallory and Gerard Stockman (eds), Ulidia: Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Ulster Cycle of Tales (Belfast, 1994), pp 281–90, at p. 284, fig. 2. 2 The Cavan area, ruled by the O’Reilly chiefs, formed the eastern section of Breifne (approximately the modern counties of Leitrim and Cavan), a border kingdom historically seen as part of Connacht, but the O’Reillys were claimed as tributary to the earl of Ulster in the fourteenth century, and became subject to the Great O’Neill in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This political association led to the inclusion of their territory in the Plantation of Ulster, and their official

33

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Fig. 2 Remains of the Black Pig’s Dyke from A. Walsh, ‘Excavating the Black Pig’s Dyke’, Emania, 3, 6.

earthworks. The rampart known as the ‘Doors of Emain’ (Doirse Emna, or Dorsey) blocked the route northwards from the Fews mountains in south county Armagh to the Iron Age hillfort of Emain Macha (Navan Ring, west of Armagh city, see Plate I), fabled in mythology as the seat of the kings of Ulster. ‘The Black Pig’s Dyke’ earthworks ran discontinuously across north Monaghan, Cavan, Fermanagh and Leitrim (see Fig. 2). Both these archaeological features date to the first century BC. Their long single or double banks were originally built with steep-sided ditches and palisades, and were apparently designed to block routes by which cattle raiders could enter and drive away livestock from the province.3 Most strikingly, timbers taken from the Dorsey (‘Doors of Emain’) yielded a dendrochronological date of c.95 BC, the same date assigned to the enigmatic circular timber structure on the enclosed hilltop of Emain Macha,4 ‘linking the royal centre of ancient Ulster with its probable periphery’,5 and serving to ‘convey something of the scale of designation as part of the northern province. See Katharine Simms, ‘The O’Reillys and the kingdom of east Breifne’, Breifne, 5:19 (1979), 305–17: 317; Ciarán Parker, ‘Cavan: a medieval border area’ in Raymond Gillespie (ed.), Cavan: essays on the history of an Irish county (Dublin, 1995), pp 37–50; Bernadette Cunningham, ‘The Anglicization of east Breifne: the O’Reillys and the emergence of county Cavan’ in ibid., pp 51–72, at pp 61–2, 70–2. 3 Barry Raftery, Pagan Celtic Ireland (London, 1994), pp 83–97. 4 M.G.L. Baillie, ‘The dating of the timbers from Navan Fort and the Dorsey, Co. Armagh’, Emania, 4 (Spring 1988), 37–40. 5 Raftery, Pagan Celtic Ireland, p. 97. The boundary question is complicated by the existence of another line of earthworks, the ‘Dane’s Cast’ (see Fig. 2), approximately separating county Armagh from county Down. As these are less firmly dated, it is not clear whether they form part of

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Fig. 3 ‘The Ulster of the Tales’ from K. Muhr, ‘The east Ulster perspective on the Ulster cycle tales’ in Emania, 14, 52.

social and economic organization in the early Iron Age’.6 Similarly, the Black Pig’s Dyke elicited its excavator’s wonder at ‘the massive effort and great organization required to plan and erect such a huge cross-country defence’.7 The strong, centralized authority that is implied by such coordinated building efforts in prehistoric times finds little echo in the depiction of that society within the legends and sagas of the Ulster cycle, mostly recorded from the same defensive system as the ‘Dorsey’ and the ‘Black Pig’s Dyke’, or indeed whether they were built to defend the county Armagh or the county Down area. Ibid., p. 88. 6 M.G.L. Baillie, ‘The central post from Navan Fort’, Emania, 1 (1986), 20–1: 21. 7  A. Walsh, ‘Excavating the Black Pig’s Dyke’, Emania, 3 (Autumn 1987), 5–11: 10; see also comments of Cooney and Grogan, Irish prehistory, p. 194; V.M. Buckley, ‘From the darkness to the dawn:

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the seventh to the fourteenth centuries AD. In these tales, a group of quarrelling, individualist heroes, including Cú Chulainn, Conall Cernach and Fergus mac Róich, are depicted as dominating a vanished prehistoric kingdom of Ulster, under the leadership of King Conchobar mac Nessa, who was alleged to have ruled the whole province from his palace at Emain Macha in the first century AD. Since these medieval tales are the major source for the popular image of Ulster’s Iron Age society, it is worth assessing their reliability in more detail. According to these tales, the southern borders of the province of Ulster in pre-Christian times were demarcated by two rivers, the Drowse (Drobais) dividing the present county Donegal from county Leitrim, and the Boyne (Bóann) in county Meath.8 (see Fig. 3) If the legends were inspired by any real tradition or folk memories of the society responsible for the Iron Age monuments, the relationship between fiction and reality after centuries of non-literate oral transmission9 was at least as tenuous as that which classical scholars now perceive between the epic poems of Homer on the siege of Troy, taking shape around the seventh or sixth century BC, at the end of Greece’s ‘Dark Age’, and the civilization of the Mycenean Greeks some five or six centuries earlier, when a historic siege of Troy may have taken place. As Oswyn Murray has pointed out, ‘later Greeks were unaware of almost all the important aspects of the world that they portrayed in Heroic poetry, such as its social organization, its material culture and its system of writing.’10 The tale of Troy, according to Denys Page, ‘reflects nothing of its Mycenean past except misty outlines and a few dim-seen details’.11 The ‘few dim-seen details’ refer principally to certain place-names and personal names, which seem to have survived in folk-memory from the earlier era. Even these details are viewed as originating not in a memory of the historical events themselves, but in the oral transmission of the plots of earlier tales and songs, composed to celebrate the events nearer the time, when some of the facts may still have been common knowledge.12 The sagas, genealogies and poems that together comprise the Ulster cycle also refer from time to time to ancient place-names that are no longer in use,13 and scholars have researched all known references to some of the more important personages named in the tales, attempting to reconstruct the oldest traditions concerning them,14 but there are at least two reasons why Ulster’s folk memory the later prehistoric and early Christian borderlands’ in Raymond Gillespie and Harold O’Sullivan (eds), The Borderlands: essays on the history of the Ulster–Leinster border (Belfast, 1989), pp 23–39, at pp 23–32. 8 Kay Muhr, ‘The East Ulster perspective on the Ulster cycle tales’, Emania, 14 (1996), 51–63, especially map on p. 52. 9 That is, as opposed to oral transmission within societies containing a literate élite class, like Europe in the early and high Middle Ages. 10 Oswyn Murray, Early Greece (Glasgow, 1980), p. 16. 11 Denys Page, History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966), p. 179. 12 Ibid., pp 218–22. 13 H.P. Bevan, ‘The topography of the Deirdre story’, Bulletin of the Ulster Place-Name Society, 5 (1957), 1–5; Muhr, ‘The east Ulster perspective on the Ulster cycle tales’. 14  Tomás

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may be even dimmer than that preserved in Homer’s Greece. In the first place, Mycenean Greece had been a literate society, although its Linear B script was no longer understood by the Homeric period. By contrast, even Ireland’s earliest script, Ogam, is not generally considered to have originated before the third or fourth century AD, and McManus would argue that our earliest surviving inscriptions belong to the fifth and sixth centuries.15 It is, in any case, a writing system best suited to short monumental inscriptions. The earliest Old Irish texts to have been written using the Latin alphabet cannot be shown to date before the seventh century AD.16 Second, Homeric Greece was a pagan society that had inherited many of its gods, Zeus, Hera, Athena, Poseidon, Artemis and Hermes, from the Mycenean period,17 whereas early medieval Ireland had experienced a radical break in religious continuity, from the pagan to the Christian faiths. Christians, in the early Middle Ages, had three possible ways of dealing with the information about pagan gods found in so much of their reading matter, for example the Latin poems of Virgil and Horace. They could regard them as demons, who really existed, but derived their powers from the devil and black magic. They could follow the Christian Platonists in seeing them as intermediate spirits between the worlds of God and man, exercising their supernatural powers under the supreme authority of the Creator. Alternatively they might believe, as the Greek philosopher Euhemerus once taught, that the so-called gods had been merely eminent human beings who had lived on earth long ago and possessed particular skills, such as the ability to cure diseases, or to foretell changes in the weather. Impressed by such talents, ignorant people had mistakenly revered them as gods and continued to pray to them after their death. Christian Irish writers used each of these three approaches at one time or another, when writing of the pagan deities who figured in their traditional myths and sagas.18 In the longest tale of the Ulster cycle, the Táin Bó Cúailgne or ‘Cattle Raid of Cooley’, the malevolent shape-changing Morrigan is equated with Allecto, one of the Furies of ancient Greek paganism, an explicit reference that supports Thurneysen’s contention that the Táin was consciously modelled on classical epics of the Trojan war, chiefly known through the Latin of Virgil.19 On the other hand, Queen Medb of Connacht, who is revealed in other texts as a supernatural embodiment of sovereignty, figures in the Táin as a historical woman, a masterful wife with a hen-pecked husband.20 Given this eclectic Ó Máille, ‘Medb Chruachna’, ZCP, 17 (1927), 129–46; Ruairí Ó hUiginn, ‘Fergus, Russ and Rudraige’, Emania, 11 (1993), 31–40; Kim McCone, ‘Aided Celtchair maic Uthecair: hounds, heroes and hospitallers in early Irish myth and story’, Ériu, 35 (1984), 1–30. 15 Damian McManus, A guide to Ogam, Maynooth Monographs 4 (Maynooth, 1991), pp 40–1. 16 Kim McCone, ‘Prehistoric, Old and Middle Irish’ in McCone & Simms, Progress, pp 7–53, at pp 21–2. 17 Page, History and the Homeric Iliad, p. 192. 18 McCone, Pagan past, pp 148–50, 157; John Carey, ‘Learning, imagination and belief ’ in Brendan Smith (ed.), The Cambridge history of Ireland, I (Cambridge, 2018), pp 47–75, at p. 69. 19 Cécile O’Rahilly (ed.), Táin Bó Cúailgne: Recension I (Dublin, 1976), pp 255–6. 20 T.F. O’Rahilly, ‘On the origins of the

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approach, any original pre-Christian tradition was bound to become distorted in transmission. Another thought-provoking comparison with Homeric literature concerns the descriptions of warfare in the Ulster cycle. Kenneth Jackson saw the accounts of the sagas as providing modern readers with ‘a window on the Iron Age’.21 His views have since been queried by archaeologists.22 Mallory has argued that ‘Cú Chulainn, Conchobor, Fergus, Conall Cernach and the other great Ulster heroes were all essentially kitted out in the garb and weapons of the early Christian and Viking periods rather than of their Iron Age predecessors’.23 Similarly, Oswyn Murray has summed up the inconsistencies in the military equipment described in the Iliad and the Odyssey: In descriptions of fighting … the chariot, which disappeared as a weapon of war at the end of the Mycenean period, is still an essential item of the aristocrat’s equipment; but the epic tradition no longer understood its military use … occasionally it even takes on the attributes of a horse and performs such feats as jumping ditches. This seems to be a combination of a Mycenean weapon with the tactics of the aristocratic mounted infantry of the late Dark Age. Again the Homeric warrior fights with a jumble of weapons from different periods: he can even start off to battle with a pair of throwing spears and end up fighting with a single thrusting one. … The elements all seem to belong to real societies: it is only their combination which is artificial; and when the different elements can be dated, they show a tendency to fall into two categories, dim reflections of Mycenean practices and a clearer portrayal of the late Dark Age world.24 Murray adds the interesting point that ‘since the poet is consciously recreating the past, he will discard the obviously contemporary and preserve what he knows to be older elements’25 thus drawing an imagined society based neither on ancient tradition miraculously preserved, nor on a faithful representation of his own times, but on what he believes to have been the custom in his grandfather’s day. Modern scholars have studied the material culture described in Homeric literature not as a reflection of the era in which the siege of Troy potentially took place, but as a source of information about the later Dark Age in Greece, from the ninth to the seventh centuries BC.26 names Érainn and Ériu’, Ériu, 14 (1943), 7–28: 15–16. 21 K.H. Jackson, The oldest Irish tradition: a window on the Iron Age (Cambridge, 1964). 22 N.B. Aitchison, ‘The Ulster cycle: heroic image and historical reality’, Journal of Medieval History, 13 (1987), 87–116; J.P. Mallory, ‘The world of Cúchulainn: the archaeology of Táin Bó Cúailgne’ in J.P. Mallory (ed.), Aspects of the Táin (Belfast, 1992), pp 103–59. 23 J.P. Mallory, ‘The literary topography of Emain Macha’, Emania, 2 (1987), 12–18: 12. 24 Murray, Early Greece, p. 39. 25 Ibid., p. 40. 26 E.g., M.I. Finley, The world of Odysseus (London, 1954).

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The nineteenth-century Irish scholar, Eugene O’Curry, made a similar observation about medieval Irish tales: the mere details of life, the customs and action of society (without which no story can be made to move along), must be drawn by the author from the manners and institutions existing around him, or, at farthest, immediately preceding him, and which still live in the popular memories of his time. If this were not so, the poet’s hearers would not understand him, the storyteller’s tale would create no interest among his audience.27 O’Curry argued strongly on this basis for the use of the sagas and romances of the Middle Ages as a source for the social customs prevailing in Ireland in medieval times. The weakness of his approach, however, was that the linguistic study of Old Irish was not sufficiently advanced in his day to allow him to distinguish clearly between the earliest texts, composed around the eighth century AD, and those coming from a much later period, for example, the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Late sagas can contain allusions to features like armorial bearings on the warriors’ shields or battle-standards, reflecting customs recently imitated from foreign neighbours, even though their cast of characters deal with the same pre-Christian heroes as before.28 Nowadays linguists can give us a better idea of the broad range of centuries within which a particular text took shape, though it is only occasionally possible to match specific personal or political allusions in the contents of a tale with real incidents and particular dates in history.29 Whatever the glories of the fictional Ulster cycle and its unified kingdom of Ulster, in truth from the dawn of Ulster’s historical record, around the end of the sixth century AD, power over the province was divided among three clusters of kingdoms: the Uí Néill dynasties of Cenél Conaill and Cenél nEógain in the north-west, the Airgialla federation of kingdoms in mid-Ulster, and the eastern group called ‘Ulaid’, the name of the people in the legendary Ulster cycle (see Fig. 4). Indeed, some rulers of this eastern group claimed direct descent from the legendary kings and heroes associated with prehistoric Emain Macha.30 If there had been a centralized authority unifying all or most of the province in prehistoric times, it was never to be recreated before 1603, with the submission of the leaders of the Nine Years War to King James I. However, the prehistoric era left its mark on the kings and chieftains of medieval Ulster. In the first place, they inherited geographical conditions that 27 Eugene O’Curry, Lectures on the manuscript materials of ancient Irish history (Dublin, 1861, repr., 1995), p. 297. 28  See Donald Meek, ‘The banners of the Fian in Gaelic ballad tradition’, CMCS, 11 (Summer 1986), 29–69: 33–6. 29 See Caoimhín Breatnach, Patronage, politics and prose (Maynooth, 1996), pp 1–39. 30 F.J. Byrne, ‘The Ireland of St Columba’ in J.L. McCracken (ed.), Historical Studies 5 (London, 1965), pp 37–58.

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Fig. 4 Ulster in sixth century, from Liam de Paor, St Patrick’s world, p. 292. Secular sites marked with rectangle, church sites with cross.

made it militarily possible to exclude invaders from the province. The fictional account of Cú Chulainn, chief hero of the Ulster cycle, defending the whole northern province single-handed during the ‘Cattle Raid of Cooley’,31 against the forces of the rest of Ireland, was to be mirrored in 1224, when the annals record that the armies of the other three provinces, both Gaels and AngloNormans, led by the justiciar of Ireland, could not penetrate the frontier of south Armagh, because O’Neill had posted his troops on the ‘Doorways of Emain’ (the ‘Dorsey’), and the passes over the Fews mountains.32 Later still, in 31 O’Rahilly, Táin Bó Cúailgne: Recension I, pp 156–60; Wade Tarzia, ‘No trespassing: border defence in the Táin Bó Cuailgne’, Emania, 3 (Autumn 1987), 28–33. 32 ALC 1, pp 270–3; Ann. Conn., pp 6–7 (AD1224); Daniel Brown, Hugh de Lacy, first earl of Ulster: rising and

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the early fifteenth century, a poem to Áed Magennis (Mág Aengusa), chief of Iveagh, Co. Down, spoke of him posted as a lone sentinel beside the ‘open door of Ulster’, probably a reference to the Newry Pass. Descended from the ‘race of the old warriors’, it says, he inherited the responsibility of guarding the gap, defending his mother’s connections, the O’Neills, as Cú Chulainn had once defended his maternal kindred, the Ulaid.33 Another fifteenth-century poem in praise of the border kingdom of Fermanagh spoke of its ‘line of fair thick woods set about the Fir Manach, protecting them’.34 Besides this defensibility of the province as a whole, the medieval chieftains inherited the Ulster cycle itself, a mass of poems and legends unanimously asserting that Ulster had once been united under a single king and, at that time, had been the most powerful territory in Ireland. There was a potential contradiction between these legends and rival legends about a prehistoric kingdom of the whole island, ruled from Tara (county Meath). This was resolved by the learned classes alleging that, during the period that Ulster came to the fore around the birth of Christ, the immemorial high-kingship of Tara was suffering an interregnum, and the five provinces of Ireland were for a time ruled independently.35 In the centuries before the Norman invasion, when the rulers of the powerful Uí Néill dynasties were struggling to assert themselves as monarchs of the whole island of Ireland, their propagandists drew inspiration mainly from the Tara legends that made up the ‘Cycles of the Kings’, concentrating especially on references to the alleged ancestors of the Uí Néill, Conn Cétchathach (Conn ‘of the Hundred Battles’) and his grandson Cormac mac Airt, who were said to have ruled all Ireland from Tara.36 Meanwhile the lesser MacDonleavy (Mac Duinnsléibe) kings, who from their capital at Downpatrick ruled Ulaid, that region of Ulster lying east of the Upper and Lower river Bann, boasted they were the sole successors to the glory of the prehistoric Ulaid.37 However, after the Anglo-Norman colonization of the east of Ireland, when all hope of a national kingship was gone, and the legendary hills of Tara and Usnagh (Temair and Uisnech, see Fig. 4) were in the hands of the foreigners, the Uí Néill of the north, principally represented now by O’Neill of Tír Eógain,38 falling in Angevin Ireland (Woodbridge, 2016), p. 4. 33 ‘Foraire Uladh ar Áodh’, poem by Maelechlainn na nUirscél Ó hUicinn, text in DiD, poem no. 96; translated Lambert McKenna, ‘To Mag Aonghusa’, The Irish Monthly, 55:650 (Aug. 1927), 435–8. 34 ‘Do mheall an sochair Síol gColla’, poem by Tadc Óc Ó hUicinn in Aithd., 2, p. 67 (no. 28, verse 21). 35 T.F. O’Rahilly, Early Irish history and mythology (Dublin, 1946), pp 177–8. 36 D.A. Binchy, ‘The Fair of Tailtiu and the Feast of Tara’, Ériu, 18 (1958), 113–38. 37 F.J. Byrne, ‘Clann Ollamain Uaisle Emna’, Studia Hibernica, 4 (1964), 54–94. 38 The Northern Uí Néill dynasties included the O’Neills, O’Donnells and MacLaughlins. They took the group designation Uí Néill (descendants of Niall) from their semi-legendary common ancestor, Niall of the Nine Hostages, who may have flourished in the fourth or fifth century AD. The medieval O’Neills of Tír Eógain, while forming a part of this larger dynastic group, were a sub-section

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began to look back nostalgically on the state of affairs depicted in the Ulster cycle, when there was no king of all Ireland, but the province of Ulster, under a single central authority, was the most powerful kingdom on the island. So taken were they with the idea of recreating this imaginary past, that in 1387, the prince Niall Óc O’Neill built a temporary banqueting hall inside the Iron Age hilltop enclosure of Emain Macha, and held a feast for the poets of Ireland there.39 (See Plate I) This same prince, whose conversation with the pilgrim Catalan knight, Ramón de Perellós, ten years later, led the latter to conclude: ‘they consider their own customs to be better than ours and more advantageous than any others in the whole world’,40 was also described by Perellós as presiding over a court where all went barefoot, a circumstance likely due to O’Neill’s nostalgia for a lost heroic past, rather than poverty.41 Desire to recreate the Spartan aesthetics of Ulster’s imagined past may be one factor explaining the economic underdevelopment of the province in the high Middle Ages, although viewed from another perspective, fashion may have only served to glamorize actual economic underdevelopment. The learned classes of medieval Ireland had long memories, reinforced by written texts in prose and verse. More than one poet of the late medieval and early modern periods pointed out embarrassingly that the O’Neills of Tír Eógain were officially descended from the Tara high-kings of all Ireland, and not from Conchobar mac Nessa and the other legendary heroes of the Ulster cycle.42 The O’Neills ignored them. The switch from a mythology based on an island-wide high-kingship, to a province-wide kingship of Ulster reflected a deeper reality. In the period between the coming of Christianity to Ireland about the fifth century AD and the end of the Viking wars at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, the northern province had been fully integrated into an all-Ireland community, and took a leading role, clearly demonstrated in three main aspects of Irish life at that time: the Tara high-kingship, which alternated between the dynasties of the Northern (Ulster) and Southern (Midlands) Uí Néill throughout this period, the primacy of the church of Armagh, which came to extend its influence across the whole island, and the dominance within the vernacular literature of all who took their surname from a later king, Niall Glúndub (Niall ‘Black-knee’), who was slain by Vikings in AD919. The territory of Tír Eógain, literally the ‘land of Eógan’ (son of Niall of the Nine Hostages), while its name is reflected in the modern county Tyrone, in medieval times was of larger extent, including county Derry, north county Armagh and originally the peninsula of Inishowen, county Donegal. 39 AU 3, pp 18–19; AFM 4, pp 706–7 (AD1387); Katharine Simms, ‘Propaganda use of the Táin in the later Middle Ages’, Celtica, 15 (1983), 142–9. 40 Above, pp 22–3. 41 Simms, ‘The barefoot kings’. As this article points out, Art MacMurrough Kavanagh, who is also depicted as going barefoot in this time, could afford to pay 400 cows for his riding-horse. See below, p. 470. 42 ‘Fada ó Ultaibh a n-oidhre’ (Tadc Óc Ó hUicinn), Aithd., poem no. 8 (see below, p. 67); A.J. Hughes, ‘The seventeenth-century Ulster/Scottish contention of the Red Hand: background and significance’ in D.S. Thomson (ed.), Gaelic and Scots in harmony: Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Languages in Scotland (Glasgow, 1990), pp 78–96.

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Ireland exercised by poems and prose texts of the Ulster cycle, in particular those concerning Cúchulainn and the saga of the ‘Cattle Raid of Cooley’, so that even royal dynasties in Kerry and Offaly were proud to claim an Ulaid descent. This leading role played by the north of Ireland within the wider island community declined after AD1000, at first as a result of the rise of a line of Munster high-kings of Ireland, the O’Briens (Uí Briain), and later as a consequence of the geographical separation of the Gaelic kingdoms from each other due to the intrusion of incoming Anglo-Norman colonists, spreading across the midlands of Ireland from Drogheda to Athlone, and further west, in the later twelfth century. The O’Neills’ switch from relying on propaganda based on an all-Ireland high-kingship of Tara, to an older glorification of the mythical province-wide kingdom of Ulaid, reflected the increasing isolation and selfcontainment of the north of Ireland in the later Middle Ages. Yet whenever an opportunity presented itself for the northern rulers to aim for island-wide dominance, the hereditary claims of the descendants of Niall of the Nine Hostages (Niall Noígiallach) to hold the high-kingship of Tara were revived by the learned classes they patronized, right up to the seventeenth century.43

T H E R I S E O F T H E U Í N É I L L A N D T H E H I G H - K I N G S H I P O F TA R A

The hill of Tara in Meath, symbolic seat of the Uí Néill high-kingship from at least the seventh to the tenth centuries, is one of a number of ancient ‘royal’ sites, like Ulster’s Emain Macha (Navan Ring, county Armagh), Dún Ailinne (Knockaulin, county Kildare) and Cruachu (Rathcroghan, county Roscommon), sites that were held sacred by successive cultures and re-used over thousands of years. While most contain traces of activity in the Bronze Age, Tara even has a Neolithic passage-grave on top of the hill, known in the early Christian period as ‘the Mound of the Hostages’.44 (See Plate II) Archaeologists have found evidence chiefly for burial and ritual activity, rather than residence, in the Iron Age use of such sites.45 Nevertheless, the early Christian authors persisted in describing these mounds as the deserted palaces of prehistoric kings, perhaps because they were re-imagining the gods venerated there as historical people.46 43 See below pp 111, 127, 153n., 198; Lambert McKenna (ed.), Iomarbhágh na bhFileadh: the Contention of the Bards (2 vols, London, 1918), passim. 44 The twelfth-century Life of St Colmán mac Luacháin claims that the pillar-stone normally identified with the Lia Fáil, but here called the Stone of the Hostages, stood on top of this mound, and the king of Tara (perhaps by this date meaning merely the king of twelfth-century Meath) was inaugurated into his office standing on this mound in front of the stone. See Kuno Meyer (ed.), Betha Colmáin maic Lúacháin, Todd Lecture series 17 (Dublin, 1911), p. 73; Leo Daly, Life of Colmán of Lynn (Dublin, 1999), pp 51–2. 45  Cooney and Grogan, Irish prehistory, pp 187–93, 218–20. 46 Byrne, Irish kings, pp 51–2.

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The tangled mass of legends surrounding the Tara kingship has led many scholars to conclude that this title preceded the rise of the Uí Néill dynasty, and was held by ‘over-kings’ drawn from various provinces of Ireland, but this did not necessarily signify political control over the whole island. Rather, it has been claimed to have served as an immensely prestigious ritual or religious office in pre-Christian times, marked by the king’s celebration of the Feis Temro, the ‘wedding-feast of Tara’, a fertility rite probably held on May Day, or Cétamuin, ‘the Easter of the Gentiles’.47 According to the medieval Irish annals, though their information for such an early period was probably the reconstruction of a later chronicler, the last ‘Feast of Tara’ ceremony was held in AD560 by Diarmait mac Cerbaill, ancestor of the Southern Uí Néill kings.48 On the other hand, the ‘Feast of Tara’ still figures in Bretha Nemed Toísech, a Munster law tract of the eighth century, as a symbolic confirmation of political authority over other kings (‘high-kingship’), a position not necessarily confined to the Uí Néill.49 The rise of the Uí Néill dynasty began just before contemporary historical writing in Ireland, and is therefore shrouded in obscurity and legend. When records began, the Uí Néill comprised a number of loosely connected ruling dynasties, each claiming descent from King Niall ‘of the Nine Hostages’ (Níall Noígiallach), a possibly historical ancestor, who may have flourished in the fifth century. Some of their earliest origin legends suggest they spread into northwest Ulster and the midlands of Ireland from a base in north-east Connacht.50 This dynasty of high-kings expanded from modest beginnings. Later propaganda, the texts of which cannot be dated earlier than about the twelfth century, claimed that three of Niall Noígiallach’s sons, Conall, Eógan and Énda, decisively defeated the Ulaid and Airgialla in a series of battles extending across the whole northern province, before setting up three kingdoms in the approximate area of modern county Donegal.51 Such evidence as we have, 47 Binchy, ‘The Fair of Tailtiu and the Feast of Tara’, pp 134–8; Byrne, Irish kings, pp 56–65; K.R. McCone, ‘Fírinne agus Torthúlacht’ in Pádraig Ó Fiannachta (eag.), Léachtaí Cholm Cille XII (Má Nuad, 1980), pp 136–73, at pp 138–41; McCone, Pagan past, p. 101. 48 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, Annals of Ulster, p. 81. On the doubtful status of our information about Diarmait mac Cerbaill see Ailbhe Mac Shamhráin, ‘Nebulae discutiuntur? The emergence of Clann Cholmáin, sixth–eighth centuries’ in A.P. Smyth (ed.), Seanchas: studies in early and medieval Irish archaeology, history and literature in honour of Francis John Byrne (Dublin, 2000), pp 83–97, at pp 91–5; Edel Bhreathnach, ‘Níell cáich úa Néill nasctar géill: the political context of Baile Chuinn Chétchathaig’ in Bhreathnach, Tara, pp 49–68, at pp 53–7. 49 Colmán Etchingham, ‘Early medieval Irish history’ in McCone and Simms, Progress, pp 123–54, at pp 131–3; Ailbhe Mac Shamhráin and Paul Byrne, ‘Prosopography I: kings named in Baile Chuinn Chétchathaig and the Airgialla Charter Poem’ in Bhreathnach, Tara, pp 159–224, at p. 210. 50 Donnchadh Ó Corráin, ‘Historical need and literary narrative’ in D.E. Evans, J.G. Griffith and E.M. Jope (eds), Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Celtic Studies, Oxford 1983 (Oxford, 1986), pp 141–58, at pp 149–51; Byrne, Irish kings, pp 83–4. 51 Bk Fen., pp 312–31; G. Lehmacher, ‘Einer Brüsseler Handschrift der Eachtra Conaill Gulban’, ZCP, 14 (1923), 212–69. The Conall associated with the Northern Uí Néill and the

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Fig. 5 Map of some early monastic foundations and battle sites.

however, suggests the Uí Néill struggle with the Ulaid lasted many generations, as indicated even by their own propagandists’ admission that the alleged conquerors were confined to territories in Donegal. The largest part of this territory formed the kingdom of the Cenél Conaill (‘Kindred of Conall [Gulban]’, reputedly eldest son of Niall), while the peninsula of Inishowen (Inis Eógain – ‘Island of Eógan’) went to the Cenél nEógain (‘Kindred of Eógan’), and the eastern area, approximating to the modern baronies of Raphoe, North and South, was associated with the Cenél nÉnda (‘Kindred of Énda).52 According to the Annals of Ulster, the Cenél Conaill and the Cenél nEógain were hired as mercenaries by one side in a civil war among the Cruthin (‘Irish Picts’), a subdivision of the Ulaid over-kingdom, who occupied the area of south county Antrim and north Derry. When their employers won the Battle of Móin Daire Lóthair in 563, the Uí Néill were rewarded with the lands of Ard Éolairgg (Magilligan’s Point) and Fir Lí (west of Lower Bann, approximately the barony of Coleraine) in north Derry. (See Figs. 1 and 5) kingdom of Tír Conaill (county Donegal minus the peninsula of Inishowen) is said to be Conall Gulban (‘C. of Ben Bulben’), distinguished in the genealogies from Conall Cremthainne, another son of Niall Noígiallach and ancestor of the Southern Uí Néill. 52 Domhnall Mac Giolla Easpaig, ‘Placenames and early settlement in county Donegal’ in

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This Battle of Móin Daire Lóthair was seen by later generations as an important turning-point in the rise of the Uí Néill.53 It marked the beginning of a slow expansion southwards by the Cenél nEógain, at the expense of the northern Airgialla group-kingdom of Uí Macc Úais, which eventually resulted in the Cenél nEógain surpassing the senior branch, Cenél Conaill, in territorial size and power. (See Fig. 6) In the later sixth century, however, Cenél Conaill were still the leaders among the Northern Uí Néill, but not yet the dominant power in Ulster, according to the genealogies of the Ulaid. These describe the Dál Fiatach king of the Ulaid, Báetán mac Cairill (reigned AD572–81), as ‘king of Ireland and Scotland’.54 While this is clearly an exaggeration, references in the annals to the invasion of the Isle of Man by the Ulaid during his reign are evidence that he wielded considerable power, though the outcome of the expedition is not recorded. The celebrated ‘meeting of the kings’ held c.AD575, at Druimm-céte in north Derry between Áed mac Ainmerech, of the Cenél Conaill, leader of the Northern Uí Néill, and Áed mac Gabrán, king of Dál Ríata, a kingdom with territory in north Antrim and south-west Scotland, may have been prompted by these two kings’ need to conclude a defensive alliance against the threat posed by the Ulaid king Báetan, and it surely demonstrated the growing influence of the Uí Néill. The annals do not record what was discussed there, but later legends about the active role played at this meeting by St Columba (Colm Cille) of the Cenél Conaill, and a direct quote from the lost early life of Colm Cille by Cumméne, suggest he may have been the link between the two kings in his capacity as missionary apostle to Scotland.55 In the first half of the seventh century, an even greater threat than Báetan to the ambitions of the Uí Néill was posed by the Cruthin king of the Ulaid, Congal Cáech (‘Congal the One-eyed’, reigned 627–37). According to the early law text Bechbretha, Congal Cáech held the office of king of Tara until he was disqualified by being blinded in one eye by a bee.56 During his reign over Ulaid, Congal succeeded in bringing not only the Dál Ríata, but even the Cenél Donegal Hist. & Soc., pp 149–82, at pp 150–3. Byrne, Irish kings (2001 ed.), p. xvi, queries whether Cenél nÉnda’s presence in Ulster can be demonstrated before the eleventh century. See Séamus Boyle, ‘A poem on Cenél Énnai’ in J.E. Doan and C.G. Buttimer (eds), Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA, 1981), pp 9–20. 53 A commemorative poem on the subject is inserted into the annals and ascribed to Cennfáelad (?mac Ailella, d.679). Adomnán, abbot of Iona (d.704), wrote that his predecessor, Saint Columba of the Cenél Conaill, had a vision of his kindred’s victory on this occasion – see Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, Annals of Ulster, p. 82; Ann. Tig., 1, 105–6 [145–6]; Byrne, ‘The Ireland of St Columba’, p. 44. 54 Corp. Gen. Hib., p. 406. 55 Byrne, ‘The Ireland of St Columba’, p. 46; Bart Jaski, ‘Druim Cett revisited’, Peritia, 12 (1998), 340–50; Máire Herbert, ‘The preface to Amra Coluim Cille’ in D. Ó Corráin, L. Breatnach and K. McCone (eds), Sages, saints and storytellers: Celtic studies in honour of Professor James Carney (Maynooth, 1989), pp 67–75, at pp 70–1. 56 T.M. Charles-Edwards and Fergus Kelly (eds), Bechbretha: an Old Irish law tract on bee-keeping (Dublin, 1983), pp 68–71.

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Early background: Ulster’s central role in Irish history Niall Noígiallach Ancestors of Southern Uí Néill

Ancestors of Northern Uí Neill Conall Gulban

Énda

Fergus Cendfhota Sétnae

Eógan

Maine

Fiacha

Cairpre

Láegaire

Muiredach

Feidilmid

Fergus Cerrbél Diarmait mac Cerbaill

Muirchertach mac Ercae

Ainmire St Columba

Domnall

Áed mac Ainmirech (d.598)

Áed Uaridnech (d.612)

Domnall mac Áedo (d.642)

Máelfithrich (d.630) Máeldúin (d.681)

Óengus

Fergal mac Máeledúin (d.722)

Loingsech mac Óengusso (d.704) Flaithbertach (d.765)

Conall Cremthainne

Áed Sláine (d.604) Colmán Mór Bláthmac (d.665)

Diarmait (d.665)

Suibne (d.600) Conall Guthbind (d.635) Airmetach

Áed Allán (d.743)

Niall Frossach (d.778)

Diarmait (d.689) Domnall Midi (d.763)

Áed Oirdnide Kg of North 788 Highkg 797–819

Donnchad Midi (d.797)

Niall Caille Kg of North 823 Highkg 833–46

Conchobar Máelrúanaid Kg of Meath 803 Kg of Meath 833–43 Highkg 819–33 Máelsechlainn I Kg Meath 845, Highkg 846–62

Áed Findliath Kg of North 855 Highkg 862–79

Domnall Dabaill Kg of North 887–916 Flann (d.908) Máelrúanaid (d.941) Máelsechlainn (d.997)

Niall Glúndub Kg of North 896 Highkg 916–19 Muirchertach ‘of the Leather Cloaks’ Kg of North 938–43 Domnall Ó Néill Kg of North 943–56 Highkg 956–80

Flann Sinna Kg Meath 877 Highkg 879–916 Donnchad Donn Highkg 919–44 Domnall (Kg Meath 961–2) Máelsechlainn II (Kg of Meath 975/6 Highkg 980–1002, 1014–22)

Muiredach Muirchertach Áed Craíbe Telcha Kg of North 989–1004 Niall Lochlainn…. Lochlainn Flaithbertach Kg of North 1004–36 Kg of North 1036–61 Ardgar MacLochlainn Áed Ó Néill Kg of North 1061–4 Kg of North 1030–3 Domnall Ua Lochlainn Kg of North 1083–1121, Highkg ‘with opposition’

(The medieval O’Neills)

Fig. 6 Selective genealogy, illustrating the alternation of the high-kingship between the Northern and Southern Uí Néill, and doubtful lineal descent of the Mac Lochlainn dynasty. Kings in boldface, nicknames in italics.

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nEógain into his alliance against the Cenél Conaill, until he was finally defeated and killed by King Domnall mac Áeda maic Ainmerech of the Cenél Conaill, at the Battle of Mag Roth (Moira, county Down) in AD637 (see Fig. 5). The Annals of Tigernach state that Domnall mac Áeda was supported by the Southern Uí Néill at this battle, and was the reigning high-king of Tara at that time.57 After the decisive Battle of Mag Roth, the Ulaid were confined to the eastern third of Ulster, with Domnall mac Áeda termed ‘king of Ireland’ in the annals’ notice of his death in 642.58 This identification of the title ‘king of Tara’ with ‘king of Ireland’, with its implied claim to political power over the island, rather than merely ritual significance, along with the association of both titles with the Uí Néill, occurs in the writings of two Ulster clerics in the late seventh century. Muirchú, the biographer of Patrick, calls Tara the caput or chief seat of the Irish, terming King Loígaire, son of Niall of the Nine Hostages, who reigned there, ‘imperator’ or ‘emperor of the barbarians’, and he identifies the Uí Néill as ‘the family that held the kingship of almost the entire island’.59 Adomnán, in his ‘Life of Columba’, wrote that the Southern Uí Néill king of Tara, Diarmait mac Cerbaill (d.565), the same king who was recorded in the annals as holding the last pagan ‘Feast of Tara’ in AD560, was ‘ordained by God’s will, as the ruler of all Ireland’ (totius Scotiae regnatorem Deo auctore ordinatum).60 Though they proudly claimed the title ‘king of Tara’, there is no evidence that the Christian Uí Néill kings resided or performed rituals there. On the contrary, the legendary sites of Tara and Emain Macha symbolize paganism in many clerical writings. Two of these clerical sources, both celebrating the triumph of Christianity over the pagan past, incidentally imply a shift over time in the dynasties associated with these sites. First, the late seventh- or early eighthcentury ‘Fíacc’s Hymn to St Patrick’ appears to boast that an Airgiallan kingship, centred on the pagan site of Emain Macha, had been superseded by the power of the church of Armagh, just four miles to the east of it; and more strikingly, that the Tara kingship had been superseded by Downpatrick, the ecclesiastical centre of the Ulaid, indicating the author associated Tara with an Ulaid king (Báetan or Congal) rather than one of the Uí Néill: In Armagh is the Kingdom; long since has Emain been forsaken; Downpatrick is a great church; it is not dear to me that Tara should be desolate.61 57 Ann. Tig., 1, pp 143–4 [183–4]; Byrne, ‘The Ireland of St Columba’, pp 47–8. 58 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, Annals of Ulster, p. 122; Ann. Tig., p. 146 [186]; Byrne, Irish kings, pp 112–14. 59  Bieler, The Patrician texts, pp 74, 82. 60  A.O. and M.O. Anderson (eds), Adomnán’s Life of Columba (Edinburgh, London and New York, 1961), pp 280–1. 61 Whitley Stokes and John Strachan (eds), Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus (2 vols, Oxford, 1903, repr. Dublin, 1975), 2, p. 317.

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By contrast, the later prologue to the Martyrology of Óengus the Culdee (c.AD800) would draw its comparison between the ecclesiastical primacy of Armagh and a pagan Tara ruled by the Uí Néill king Lóiguire, rather than by any Ulaid king. Since Óengus is associated with the Culdee monastery at Tallaght, county Dublin, this implies widespread acceptance of Muirchú’s interpretation of history by AD800, even outside Uí Néill territory, erasing all reference to the Ulaid and other dynasties as kings of Tara: Tara’s mighty burgh perished at the death of her princes: with a multitude of venerable champions the great Height of Machae (Armagh) abides. Right valiant Lóiguire’s pride has been quenched – great the anguish: Patrick’s name, splendid, famous, this is on increase.62 Muirchú’s qualification, that Uí Néill rule covered ‘almost the entire island’, is significant. An eighth-century Old Irish poem, on the rights and privileges of the mid-Ulster federated kingdoms of the Airgialla, indicates that dynasties who descended from five prominent Uí Néill kings – the Cenél nEógain and the Cenél Conaill in the northern province, and the Síl nÁedo Sláine, Clann Cholmáin Mór and Clann Cholmáin Becc in the midlands – were jointly led by whichever king of their number held the submission of the Airgialla rulers, who are there listed as the kings of Uí Macc Uais, Uí Chremthainn, Airthir and Mugdorna, their combined territories stretching from Lough Foyle on the north coast of Derry to Dunboyne in Meath (see Fig. 4). The over-king of the Uí Néill is described in this poem as ‘lord of Tara and Tailtiu’ (coimdi Temrae scéo Tailten), ‘king of the Uí Neill’ (do rig hUe Néill) and ‘king of Leth Cuind’, that is, of ‘Conn’s Half ’ of Ireland, a reference to a legendary division between the overkings of north and south that allotted Connacht, Meath and Ulster to King Conn of the Hundred Battles, reputed king of Tara and ancestor of the Uí Néill.63 62 Whitley Stokes (ed.), The Martyrology of Oengus the Culdee (London, 1905; repr. Dublin, 1984), p. 24. 63 Mary O’Daly (ed.), ‘A poem on the Airgialla’, Ériu, 16 (1952), 179–88, verses 1, 21, 34; see also Edel Bhreathnach and Kevin Murray, ‘The Airgialla Charter Poem: edition’ in Bhreathnach, Tara, pp 124–58. Bart Jaski, ‘The Vikings and the kingship of Tara’, Peritia, 9 (1995), 310–51: 311–12, argues that the division of Ireland into two spheres of influence north and south, christened Leth Chuinn and Leth Moga respectively, is first recorded in the eighth century and may originate with the meeting of the northern and southern over-kings Aed Allán and Cathal mac Finguine in AD737. T.M. Charles-Edwards in ‘The Uí Néill 695– 743: the rise and fall of dynasties’, Peritia, 16 (2002), 396–418: 402, suggests that the poem to the Airgialla likewise dates to the 730s. Edel Bhreathnach, ‘The Airgialla Charter Poem: the political context’ in Bhreathnach, Tara, pp 95–9, at p. 99, suggests a date between 722 and 743. See also T.M. Charles-Edwards, ‘The Airgialla Charter Poem: the legal context’, ibid., pp 100–23; Mac Shamhráin and Byrne, ‘Prosopography I: kings named in Baile Chuinn Chétchathaig and the Airgialla Charter Poem’, ibid.; Byrne, Irish kings, pp 115–17.

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The implication of this Airgialla ‘charter poem’ is that, by the eighth century, the Uí Néill lords had won a monopoly of the Tara kingship, but that this kingship did not as yet cover the whole island. Binchy has pointed out that the recorded attendance at the ‘Fair of Tailtiu’ or Teltown, county Meath, a great assembly held annually from pagan times to the end of the ninth century, and presided over by the king of Tara, was confined to the Uí Néill kingdoms and their dependencies, from west and central Ulster and the Irish midlands, and that therefore this annual gathering could hardly be seen as a ‘national’ or ‘nationwide’ institution.64 As Swift argues, however, Binchy oversimplified, because he ignored a number of hints that the ancient prestige of the Tara kingship was taken to imply an island-wide supremacy, however vaguely conceived, for those who laid claim to it.65 It was left to the Uí Néill kings themselves to convert this mythical supremacy into political reality. The Uí Néill high-kingship was to develop in a number of ways during the ninth century. The Northern Uí Néill were now led by the expanding midUlster kingdom of the Cenél nEógain, whose territorial power had overtaken that of the Cenél Conaill, leaving the latter fenced into the more remote area of Donegal. The title ‘king of the North’ (Rí in Fhochlai or Rí in Tuaisceirt) was used to signify supremacy over both Cenél Conaill and Cenél nEógain, an authority centred initially on the royal hilltop fortress of Ailech in Inishowen (see Plate V).66 From the mid-eighth century, the Westmeath branch of the Southern Uí Néill, the Clann Cholmáin, similarly rose to eclipse the power of their kinsmen in eastern Meath, the Síl nÁeda Sláine. Instead of being a prize competed for among the four leading Uí Néill dynasties, the Tara over-kingship began to alternate with surprising regularity between these two strong royal lines of the northern Cenél nEógain and the southern Clann Cholmáin. Each line, north and south, developed a father-to-son succession, a sign of political stability, and yet, as Jaski points out: ‘the alternation between the two leading dynasties provided that none of the kings of Tara could profit from the achievements of his predecessor, and this disrupted the continuity necessary for permanent ascendancy over Ireland.’67 (See Fig. 6) Meanwhile, as the frontier of Cenél nEógain expansion advanced southwards, across what is now county Tyrone,68 their nobles colonizing lands that had previously belonged to the Airgialla,69 the kings of Cenél nEógain became ever 64 Binchy, ‘The Fair of Tailtiu and the Feast of Tara’, pp 117–21. 65 Catherine Swift, ‘Óenach Tailten, the Blackwater Valley and the Uí Néill kings of Tara’ in A.P. Smyth (ed.), Seanchas, pp 109–20, at pp 118–19. On the vagueness of the indications that the Tara title was seen as an island-wide kingship see Jaski, Early Irish kingship, pp 214–18. 66 Eoin MacNeill, Celtic Ireland, ed. Donnchadh Ó Corráin (Dublin, 1981), pp 132–5; Byrne, Irish kings, p. 283. 67 Jaski, ‘The Vikings and the kingship of Tara’, p. 314. 68 The name Tyrone derives from ‘Tír Eógain’, ‘Land of Eógan’. ‘Cenél nEógain’ signifies ‘the kindred of Eógan [son of Niall of the Nine Hostages’]. 69 Byrne, Irish kings, p. 114.

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more eager to control the wealthy and prestigious office of St Patrick’s heir, the ecclesiastical ruler of Armagh. During the reign of Áed Oirdnide (‘Áed the Ordained’, d.819), Uí Néill king of the North and of Tara, a local Armagh family of Airgialla origin, the Clann Sínaich, took its first steps towards acquiring hereditary right to rule the church of Armagh, when Abbot Dub-dá-leithe I was directly succeeded by his son Connmach in AD793. The move was fiercely contested by a number of rival candidates, supported in turn by the kings of Uí Cremthainn in western Airgialla, by the Southern Uí Néill and even by the Ulaid, ecclesiastical politics triggering violent political confrontation, permanently altering the balance of power in the North. Abbot Dub-dá-leithe came to power by killing his rival Fáendelach, who had southern support. Armagh was militarily invaded in 793 by the Uí Cremthainn in an unsuccessful attempt to impose their candidate after Dub-dá-leithe’s death, and Dub-dá-leithe’s son Abbot Connmach ‘died suddenly’ and quite possibly violently, in 807.70 Of the many exceptionally short-lived abbots holding or claiming office during this stressful time, three are named in the Book of Leinster’s succession list of the ‘heirs of Patrick’ as not officially commemorated by having their names read out in the Mass, because they had seized the abbacy by force.71 It is noteworthy that the scholar-abbot Torbach (d.808), who commissioned the compilation of the Book of Armagh,72 perhaps in an attempt to recall the original heritage of Patrick, their founder saint, does not figure on this succession list at all. Eventually matters came to a head when Níall Caille (‘Niall of the river Callan’), Uí Néill king of the North, forcibly imposed his own ‘soul-friend’ or father confessor, Eógan of Monasterboice, as abbot on the community of Armagh. His actions led, in 827, to the great Battle of Leth Cam (see Fig. 5). There, Cenél nEógain inflicted a heavy defeat on the kings of both the western Airgialla and the Ulaid, and after this battle, according to a tradition subsequently recorded in the Middle Irish tract Cóir Anmann, the kings of the Airgialla territories became tribute-paying subject allies of Cenél nEógain of the Northern Uí Néill.73 This was a change from the agreement set out in the early eighth-century poem on the Airgialla, which described them as merely military 70 Kim McCone, ‘Clones and her neighbours in the early period: hints from some Airgialla saints’ lives’, Clogher Record, 11 (1984), 305–25: 314–17; Tomás Ó Fiaich, ‘The church of Armagh under lay control’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 5 (1969), 75–127: 82–3; Etchingham, Church organization, p. 204. 71 H.J. Lawlor and R.I. Best, ‘The ancient list of the Coarbs of Patrick’, PRIA, 35C (1919), 316–62: 345–9; R.I. Best, Osborn Bergin and M.A. O’Brien (eds), The Book of Leinster, 1 (Dublin, 1954), p. 200. 72 Richard Sharpe, ‘Palaeographical considerations in the study of the Patrician documents in the Book of Armagh’, Scriptorium, 36 (1982), 3– 28: 25–7; Frederick Pfeiffer, ‘Abbot Torbach’s manuscript, the Book of Armagh, Liber Ardmachanus’ (M.Phil., TCD, 1997). 73 Whitley Stokes, ‘Cóir Anmann (Fitness of Names)’ in Irische Texte 3, pt 2 (Leipzig, 1897), pp 285–444, at pp 350–1; Sharon Arbuthnot, Cóir Anmann. A late Middle Irish treatise on personal names – part 2 (Dublin, 2007), pp 35–6, 110.

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allies of whoever was appointed king of Tara, without owing tribute, and regardless of whether the Tara king came from the Northern or Southern Uí Néill. The power of the Cenél nEógain, as kings of the North, was consolidated as a result, and their links with Armagh strengthened. In 846, Níall Caille, now holding the coveted title ‘king of Tara’, was drowned in the river Callan that flows past Armagh. According to Cóir Anmann, this occurred when he was crossing it with a band of cavalry, perhaps from a base in the ecclesiastical city. During the reign of Níall’s son, Áed Findlíath (‘Fair-Greyhaired Aed’), there is no doubt as to the location of the royal residence. In 870, the Annals of Ulster state that a man was slain in Armagh ‘in front of the house of Áed, king of Tara’.74 In 935, we are told of a ‘cemetery (or mausoleum) of the kings’ at Armagh, where a grandson of Áed Findliath was duly buried.75 Byrne has suggested that it was during the ninth century that the myth of ‘the Three Collas’ first took shape.76 This was a genealogical claim that all the ruling dynasties of the Airgialla descended from three brothers, Áed, Muiredach and Cairell, known as Colla Menn, Colla fo Chrí and Colla Úais respectively. These are represented as first cousins of the Tara king Muiredach Tírech (‘Muiredach the Landed’), who was grandfather of Niall of the Nine Hostages, and thus their descendants would be kinsmen to the Uí Néill. It was claimed ‘the Three Collas’ conquered mid-Ulster from the Ulaid and possessed and settled it as ‘swordland’ (land conquered rather than inherited) at the instigation of Muiredach Tírech, their senior kinsman, though they were allegedly debarred from ever aspiring to the Tara kingship as punishment for the kin-murder of their uncle, Muiredach Tírech’s father.77 The doubtful historical truth of this legend is less important than its practical function in binding the now tributary Airgialla more closely to their Uí Néill overlords. The bond thus developed between the Airgialla and the Cenél nEógain, in the ninth century, weakened the link between the Northern and Southern Uí Néill. As their connection with the Patrician church of Armagh loosened, Tara high-kings drawn from the southern or Meath dynasty of Clann Cholmáin began to sponsor the monasteries of Columba instead. The royal estate of Kells was granted to the abbot of Iona c.AD804, and a splendid new monastery there eventually became head of the Columban churches in Ireland.78 Over the same eighth- to ninth-century period, a cadet branch of the Connacht ruling dynasty of Uí Briúin began an eastward expansion, annexing a number of miscellaneous small population groups along the infertile frontier-lands between Connacht, 74 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, Annals of Ulster, pp 304–5, 326–7. See Stokes, Cóir Anmann, pp 340–1. 75 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, Annals of Ulster, pp 384–5, 500–1. 76 Byrne, Irish kings (2001 ed.), p. xvi. 77 Corp. Gen. Hib., pp 130–1, 139–40, 147–52. 78 Máire Herbert, Iona, Kells and Derry: the history and hagiography of the monastic familia of Columba (Oxford, 1988), pp 64–81.

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Ulster and Meath, and creating a new kingdom of Breifne, a buffer-state physically separating lands of the Northern and Southern Uí Néill (see Plate  III).79 This gradually developing split between the two branches was eventually to weaken the federation of the Uí Néill as a whole, laying them open to a challenge from Munster to their desired island-wide dominance. The most radical change of all was the arrival of Viking raiders to the shores of Ireland from 795 onwards. Both the Northern and Southern Uí Néill rulers responded strongly to the threat during the ninth century. Máelsechlainn I of the southern Clann Cholmáin captured and drowned a notorious Viking leader, Turgesius, in 845, just one year before he succeeded to the high-kingship of Tara on the death of Níall Caille. During Máelsechlainn’s reign as high-king, the normally recalcitrant Ulaid attended his council in 851, while in 854, 856 and 858 he took hostages from the province of Munster, and in 859 the king of Munster agreed to transfer authority over the contentious border territory of Osraige (Ossory) to Tara. Máelsechlainn is thus the first over-king of the Uí Néill whose claim to rule all Ireland shows some relationship to actuality.80 In his turn, the king of the North, Áed Findliath, son of Níall Caille, who succeeded Máelsechlainn as high-king of Tara in 862, launched a devastating attack on Viking strongholds around the Ulster coast in 866, allegedly killing 1,200 on the shores of Lough Foyle. It could be argued that his campaigns were too successful, as Ulster never thereafter held Norse settlements to equal the economic importance of the Viking seaports further south such as Dublin, Waterford, Cork and Limerick – one possible reason why urbanization and commerce would remain underdeveloped among Ulster Gaels. There was another more insidious threat that the Vikings posed to Uí Néill dominance. As their settlements multiplied along the east coast, their fighting-men became permanently available to serve the Irish kings as heavy-armed auxiliaries, exacerbating pre-existing civil wars and revolts.81 Now that the high-kingship began to be a position of real power, the dynasts of Clann Cholmáin and Cenél nEógain fought bitterly to monopolize succession within their own line. Towards the end of the northern Áed Findlíath’s reign, he ceased to hold the traditional Fair of Tailtiu in Meath. After his death, the new king of Tara, the southern Flann son of Máelsechlainn, brought a mixed army of Vikings and Irish to attack Armagh in 882, presumably because it was the headquarters of Áed Findlíath’s sons, Níall Glúndub (‘Niall Black-knee’) and Domnall Dabaill (‘Domnall of the Blackwater river’). In 889, Domnall Dabaill brought the warriors of the North of Ireland to attack the Southern Uí Néill, and once again, the Fair of Tailtiu, symbol of the unity of Northern and Southern Uí Néill, was not held in that year. 79  M.V. Duignan, ‘Notes on the history of the kingdom of Breifne’, JRSAI, 65 (1935), 112–40. 80 Jaski, ‘The Vikings and the kingship of Tara’, pp 317–19. 81 Ibid., p. 350.

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At last in the early tenth century, as the long reign of the Southern Uí Néill king, Flann, drew to a close, the military successes of the northern king, Níall Glúndub son of Áed Findlíath, put him in such a dominant position that he was able to arbitrate in 915 between the elderly Flann and his rebellious sons. When Flann died in 916, the Ulster king Níall Glúndub, who became the ancestor of the modern O’Neills of Tyrone, succeeded peacefully to the high-kingship of Tara, and celebrated the long-neglected Fair of Tailtiu. In 917, Níall, as king of Ireland, led the combined forces of the Northern and Southern Uí Néill into Munster, in an unsuccessful attempt to protect that province from renewed Viking invasions. This new-found Irish unity was aborted, however, when Niall was defeated and killed by the Vikings of Dublin in AD919. Though his highkingship had lasted a mere three years, this Niall Glúndub enjoyed enduring fame in Irish literature. A poem inserted in the Annals of Ulster when noting his death exclaims: ‘It is to view the heaven and not see the sun, to behold Niall’s plain without Niall’. He is lamented as the ‘great and gentle king’ in a cycle of poems attributed to his mourning wife, Gormlaith, daughter of the southern high-king, Flann.82 Hostilities were to break out once more between Níall’s son Muirchertach and the southern king of Tara, Donnchad son of Flann.83 Though they subsequently patched up their differences, Muirchertach was slain in battle by the Dublin Vikings in 943, before he could succeed Donnchad in the Tara kingship, and a power vacuum ensued, during which the rulers of the less powerful Cenél Conaill and Síl nÁeda Sláine, branches of the Northern and Southern Uí Néill respectively, fought each other for the Tara title. From 956 to 980, Muirchertach’s son, Domnall of Armagh, was recognized as the reigning king of Tara, while others among his kinsmen in the Northern Uí Néill succeeded one another in the lesser office of ‘kings of Ailech’, primarily associated with the peninsula of Inishowen and what is now county Derry.84 Domnall was also known to his contemporaries as Domnall Úa Néill, or Ó Néill, ‘grandson of Níall (Glúndub)’, and this title has remained with his descendants in Tyrone as the surname ‘O’Neill’ ever since. He was the last of his direct line to achieve high-kingship before the Norman invasion of 1169. Although he led the Airgialla and Ulaid into battle along with his own troops, he was not able to secure the uninterrupted allegiance of the Southern Uí Néill, and never even attempted to subdue Munster.85 Similarly, his successor, Máelsechlainn II, was the last Clann Cholmáin king of Tara for the Southern Uí Néill. He was a 82 Bergin, IBP, pp 202–15, 308–15. The language of the poems is too modern to be the work of Queen Gormlaith herself, but a passing reference to the wife of the abbot of Kells might suggest a date before the mid-twelfth-century reform of the Irish church. This would make it one of the earliest Irish examples of the theme of romantic love. See below, p. 439. 83 MacAirt and MacNiocaill, Annals of Ulster, pp 364–71, 380–1. 84 James Hogan, ‘The Irish law of kingship, with special reference to Ailech and Cenél Eoghain’, PRIA, 40C (1932), 186–254: 207–8. 85 MacAirt and MacNiocaill, Annals of Ulster, pp 400–15.

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notably successful military leader, who inflicted a crushing defeat in 980 on the Vikings of Dublin and their Hebridean allies, which may have been more decisive than the better-known Battle of Clontarf in 1014, and he was certainly hailed by the annals as ending ‘the Babylonian Captivity of Ireland’.86 Nevertheless, when his position was challenged by the upstart Munster king, Brian Boru (Brian Bóruma), Máelsechlainn II eventually had to submit in 1002 and acknowledge the rule of Brian, who claimed sovereignty over all Ireland not using the traditional title ‘king of Tara’, but the more Continental ‘Emperor of the Irish’.87 About a hundred years later, the anonymous author of the saga about Brian’s career, ‘The war of the Irish with the Foreigners’ (Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh), placed the blame for Máelsechlainn’s fall from power on the hostility and suspicion of the northern Cenél nEógain counsellors, who advised their king, Áed O’Neill (son of Domnall of Armagh), not to lend his southern kinsman, Máelsechlainn, the military support that he needed to resist Brian.88 The speeches the writer put in the mouths of the principal characters were clearly invented, but the political facts were plain. When Northern and Southern Uí Néill cooperated, and the king of Tara commanded the military forces of both the north of Ireland and the midlands, he had the strength to dominate all Ireland. Separated from each other, both physically, by the new frontier kingdom of Breifne, and politically, by dynastic competition and feuding, the kings of Clann Cholmáin and Cenél nEógain had no greater claim to national leadership than any of the other provincial kings. The eleventh century ushered in a period of ‘high-kings with opposition’, in which kings from every province in turn strove for countrywide domination. The Tara title became meaningless and the North, which had for so long been at the heart of Irish politics, entered a period of comparative isolation. The influence of Ulster over the rest of Ireland had not rested only in the dominance of its kings, but in the religious leadership Armagh wielded in the name of Patrick, apostle of Ireland, yet even this great church transferred its allegiance to the Munster high-king, Brian. T H E P R I M AC Y O F T H E C H U RC H O F A R M AG H OV E R T H E R E S T OF IRELAND

The British saint Patrick has left behind a uniquely personal account of his mission to convert the Irish to Christianity in his Confessio, a Latin text defending his conduct against unnamed critics in the British church. Unfortunately for historians, while we are given a vivid picture of Patrick’s 86 Ibid., pp 414–15; Ann. Tig., pp 233–4 [341–2]. 87 Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Brian in Armagh (1005)’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 9 (1978), 35–50, 42; see below, pp 59–60. 88 H. Todd (ed.), Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh: The war of the Gaedhil with the Gaill, of the invasions of Ireland by the Danes and other Norsemen (London, 1867), pp 126–9.

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interior spiritual life, he mentions only two place-names, both unidentified, and his only clear indicator of date is a reference to the Franks in Gaul as still pagan.89 It is impossible to prove beyond doubt whether Patrick preached in the late fourth or the fifth century. It has, however, been plausibly speculated that he laboured in the north of Ireland, at a time when the Ulaid kings, who subsequently only ruled territory east of the Upper and Lower river Bann, were still in control of the Armagh area, and an unspecified extent of mid-Ulster. This theory would serve to explain why the three churches most closely connected with the cult of St Patrick – Saul, Downpatrick and Armagh – are later separated between two mutually hostile jurisdictions, the Ulaid and the Airgialla. The contention is that Patrick’s mission was conducted inside a single over-kingdom of the Ulaid, whose borders were later driven back, leaving the Patrician church at Armagh to become a jewel in the crown of the victorious Airgialla. As the Airgialla in turn became subject to the Uí Néill high-kings, Uí Néill patronage assisted Armagh, not only to become the most powerful of the Patrician churches but, from the seventh century onwards, to lay claim to primacy within the Irish church as a whole.90 The ‘Book of the Angel’ is a short document now preserved in the ninthcentury Book of Armagh, but there is evidence that an early version of this text was known in the mid-seventh century.91 It claims for the church of Armagh vast sanctuary lands, stretching from just north of the river Boyne to Slemish mountain in county Antrim. Significantly, this is a geographical area associated rather with the declining kingdom of the Ulaid than the rising power of the Uí Néill, who were able to confine the Ulaid within the bounds of north Louth and eastern Ulster after their decisive victory at the Battle of Mag Roth (Moira, county Down) in AD637.92 The fact that the sanctuary lands claimed for the church of Armagh coincide to such an extent with Ulaid territory, including territories lost during the Battle of Mag Roth, may suggest that the core of this document was framed before the battle. Even at this early date, however, the ‘Book of the Angel’ emphatically asserts the primacy of Armagh over all Ireland: 89 N.J.D. White (ed.), The Latin writings of St Patrick (Dublin, 1905), pp 221–4; A.B.E. Hood, St Patrick, his writings and Muirchu’s Life, Arthurian Period Sources no. 9 (London and Chichester, 1978), pp 23, 27, 37, 41, 46, 57. 90 Byrne, Irish kings, pp 50–1, 82–3; D.A. Binchy, ‘St Patrick and his biographers, ancient and modern’, Studia Hibernica, 2 (1962), 7– 173: 150–4; Clare Stancliffe, ‘Kings and conversion: some comparisons between the Roman mission to England and St Patrick’s to Ireland’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 14 (1980), 59– 94: 64–5. Richard Sharpe, ‘St Patrick and the see of Armagh’, CMCS, 4 (Winter 1982), 33– 59, differs from these views in that he accepts the historicity of Patrick’s traditional association with the Ulaid churches of Saul and Downpatrick, but is unconvinced that the cult of Patrick at Armagh originated in the lifetime of the saint himself. 91 Richard Sharpe, ‘Armagh and Rome in the seventh century’ in Proinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter (eds), Irland und Europa: Ireland and Europe, the early church (Tübingen, 1984), pp 58–72, at p. 62. 92 Byrne, ‘The Ireland of St Columba’, p. 46; Byrne, Irish kings, pp 112–14.

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the Lord God has given all the tribes of the Irish as a paruchia [‘diocese’] to you [Patrick] and to this city, which in Irish is named Ardd Machae … it has precedence … over all churches and monasteries of the Irish … every free church and city of episcopal rank … and any place anywhere that is called domnach93 (is), according to the word of the angel, in special union with bishop Patrick and the heir of his see of Armagh, because … God has given him the entire island. … (Patrick) himself will judge all the Irish on the great day of the terrible judgement in the presence of Christ.94 In the second half of the seventh century, the ‘Memoir’ of Bishop Tírechán, also preserved in the Book of Armagh, repeated the claims about the angel’s message to Patrick conferring primacy on the saint’s ‘heir’ at Armagh, but adapts the myth to reflect the new dominance of the Uí Néill over the Armagh region. Tírechán adds an account of St Patrick’s meeting with the legendary or semilegendary ancestors of the Uí Néill dynasties, Cairbre, Conall and Loígaire, sons of Niall of the Nine Hostages. By the seventh century, the head of the Uí Néill federation of dynasties had become high-king of Tara, dominating the Airgialla territories where Armagh was situated. Tírechán paid particular attention to the figure of Conall Cremthainne,95 reputed ancestor of the Southern Uí Néill, whose line monopolized the Tara high-kingship from AD658 to AD695, the period within which Tírechán was writing, and depicts Patrick confirming Conall’s supremacy over his brother Cairbre, the legendary ancestor of the related dynasty of high-kings that Conall’s descendants had recently replaced, indicating that the political concerns of his own time dominated over the historical realities of Patrick’s era in Tírechán’s account: (Conall) received [Patrick] very hospitably, and [Patrick] baptized him, and established his throne for ever, and said to him: ‘The seed of thy brother [Cairbre] shall serve thy seed for ever. And thou must give alms to my heirs after me for ever, and thy sons and (the sons) of thy sons must pay perpetual dues to my sons in the Faith for ever’.96 93 ‘Domnach’ was a very early borrowing from the Latin dominicum in the sense of ‘a church building’. The Irish recognized that its occurrence in a place-name indicated an early church foundation from the period of Ireland’s conversion – see Deirdre Flanagan, ‘The Christian impact on early Ireland: place-names evidence’ in Ní Chatháin and Richter (eds), Irland und Europa: Ireland and Europe, the early church, pp 25–51, at pp 25–31. 94 Bieler, The Patrician texts, pp 185, 189–91 (my additions in square brackets). A later paragraph, which specifies the subordination of the church of Armagh to the church of Rome, may have been added some time in the later seventh or eighth century, as it is not given a direct association with the story of Patrick’s angelic vision. 95 Genealogists credit Niall of the Nine Hostages with two sons called Conall, Conall Cremthainne, ancestor of the Southern Uí Néill kings of Meath and Conall Gulban, ancestor of the Cenel Conaill kings in the Donegal area. 96 Bieler, The Patrician texts, p. 133. See T.M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2000), pp 19–21.

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Tírechán’s origin story, advocating the Uí Néill high-kings’ duty of patronage toward the church of Armagh, makes obvious the economic inducements for maintaining close links between Patrick’s congregation and the most powerful rulers of his day, and this would be elaborated by later writers. The scholar Muirchú moccu Machtheni (fl. AD697) wrote a narrative biography of Patrick, using the saint’s own Confessio, together with unrelated historical materials he had gathered, such as information found in the chronicle of Prosper of Aquitaine recording that in AD431 Pope Celestine sent a certain Palladius as ‘first bishop to the Irish believing in Christ’97 – a mission Muirchú insisted must have failed, thus making way for the superior claims of St Patrick. Muirchú’s biography repeated Tírechán’s story of Patrick’s contact with the Uí Néill, but unlike Tírechán, Muirchú claimed that Patrick successfully converted Loígaire, considered the reigning king of Tara at the time of Patrick’s mission. However, Muirchú carefully avoided undermining the position of the high-kings of his own day, who claimed descent from Loígaire’s brother, Conall Cremthainne: King Loígaire summoned his elders and his whole council and said to them: ‘It is better for me to believe than to die’, and having held counsel, acting on the advice of his followers, he believed on that day and became converted to the Lord the eternal God, and many others believed on that occasion. And holy Patrick said to the king: ‘Since you have resisted my teaching and been offensive to me, the days of your own reign shall run on, but none of your offspring shall ever be king’.98 The last section of Muirchú’s Life explains that it was by a decree of the angel Victor, who had originally summoned Patrick in a vision to convert the Irish, that the saint was buried in Downpatrick, but Armagh, ‘the place he loved more than any other’, was to be the seat of his authority.99 It was one thing for the northern church to claim nationwide primacy in documents like the Book of the Angel; it was quite another to exercise the rights of ecclesiastical taxation and jurisdiction that went with these claims. This could only be done with the backing of secular powers. For example the cána or ‘laws’ of the religious communities of Columba, Patrick, Daire and others, prohibiting violence against women, clerics and children, the wanton slaughter of cattle in warfare, and working or fighting on a Sunday, could only be enforced when a local king ‘bound’ such an ordinance on his subject population. By his authority, the prescribed fines for breach of these decrees were collected from lawbreakers, and handed over to the ‘heir’ of the saint concerned – the bishop or abbot of Armagh in the case of St Patrick’s community. Normally, this enforcement was 97 Liam de Paor, Saint Patrick’s world (Dublin, 1993), p. 79. See Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, ‘Who was Palladius “First Bishop of the Irish”?’ Peritia, 14 (2000), 205–37. 98 Bieler, The Patrician texts, pp 97–9. 99 Ibid., pp 117–21.

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a periodic one, coinciding with the visitation of a particular kingdom by the ‘heir’ of the saint and his retinue, who made a circuit of the territory bearing relics of their patron, while the local king saw to it that the fines due for breaches of the saint’s ‘law’ were paid. These payments during the circuit of relics seem to have degenerated in later times into a general tribute, assessed on all landowners in the area.100 The ‘Law of Patrick’ (penalizing attacks on the clergy) is first referred to in the annals in connection with taking the relics of Patrick himself, together with relics of the apostles Peter and Paul which were kept at Armagh, on circuit in AD734, the very same year in which a new high-king of Tara, Áed Allán of the Northern Uí Néill, came to power. Three years later, after a conference held between this northern king and the over-king of Munster, Cathal mac Finguine, the annals tell us that ‘the Law of Patrick bound Ireland’ (Lex Patricii tenuit Hiberniam),101 implying that Cathal had agreed, under pressure from the Uí Néill king, to accept the ecclesiastical authority of Armagh in his territory also. This marks the first clear evidence of the acceptance of Armagh’s primacy outside the Uí Néill territories of Ulster and Meath. By the early ninth century, the link thus developed, between claiming secular high-kingship of all Ireland and supporting the primacy of Armagh within the Irish church, seems to have prompted the Munster king Fedlimid mac Crimthainn to bring bishop Artrí mac Conchobair of Armagh on circuit with relics in AD823, to impose the Law of Patrick on his southern province. He did this in spite of the fact that he opposed the Uí Néill, inflicting a defeat on them in AD830. In AD836, Fedlimid violently intervened against one of two competing abbots of Armagh in apparent support of the other, showing that his investment in the Church of Armagh, and acceptance of its now traditional primacy, had been unaffected by his opposition to the Uí Néill dynasty, which climaxed in AD840, when Fedlimid symbolically proclaimed his rivalry by camping on the site of Tara itself and abducting the wife of the Uí Néill high-king.102 Eventually, the long-standing association between the Uí Néill dynasty and an exclusive claim to the high-kingship of Ireland was broken by the submission of the Southern Uí Néill king of Tara, Máelsechlainn II, to the Munster highking, Brian Bóruma (the famed ‘Brian Boru’) in 1002. King Brian followed up his political victory by a visit to the church of Armagh in 1005, at which time his secretary, Máel Suthain, wrote an entry on a blank space in the Book of Armagh, ‘in the presence of “Brian, Emperor of the Irish” (imperator Scotorum)’, 100 Kathleen Hughes, The church in early Irish society (London, 1966), pp 149–52, 244–5; Colmán Etchingham, Church organization in Ireland, AD650–1000 (Maynooth, 1999), pp 194–218. 101 Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill (eds), The Annals of Ulster to 1131 (Dublin, 1983), pp 186–7, 190–1; Etchingham, Church organization, pp 203–4. 102 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster, pp 278–9, 286–9, 292–3, 298–9; AI, pp 126–9; Byrne, Irish kings, pp 220–9.

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recording that Brian confirmed, on behalf of all the kings of Munster, that baptismal dues, legal causes and alms were due to Armagh by the dying testament of St Patrick.103 From the early ninth century, Armagh had appointed a resident clerical administrator, the ‘moer muinteri Patraicc’ or ‘steward of Patrick’s community’, to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction and collect church dues from the territory of the Southern Uí Néill in the Louth and Meath area. After the acknowledgment of Armagh’s rights by Brian Boru, the annals record a similar ‘steward of Patrick’s community’ appointed to represent Armagh’s interests in Munster.104 Thenceforward the primacy of the church of Armagh over all Ireland was assured, and in the course of the twelfth-century church reform, it was to be formally recognized as an archbishopric, at the head of the Irish church hierarchy. This privileged position was not accorded to Armagh simply on the basis of its association with St Patrick, an association it shared with Saul and Downpatrick. Its link with the Uí Néill high-kings of Tara, so eagerly courted in the Patrician writings of Tírechán and Muirchú, had been crucial to its ascendancy. Even after the political collapse of the Uí Néill, the enduring prestige of the ‘heir of Patrick’ at Armagh continued to give this Ulster foundation a leading role within the Irish church. Similarly, the early and enduring prestige of the Ulster literary cycle and its island-wide dissemination was to survive both the fall of the Ulaid, and the decline of the Uí Néill.

T H E C R E AT I O N O F A S E C U L A R L I T E R AT U R E F O R I R E L A N D

Against the highly competitive political background that obtained in the north of Ireland in the early Middle Ages, an innovatory literature was born. It is only from the seventh century onwards that we have clear evidence that clerical scholars in Ireland had devised a way of using the Latin alphabet to write a standardized literary form of Old Irish, employed by learned men across the island, with no dialect differences. The earliest arguably dateable texts come from Leinster and Munster, and consist of genealogies of the regional kings and legal material. Both of these literary genres fulfilled a clerical, Christian need. On the one hand, the ancestry of Irish kings was ultimately traced back in these works not to pagan gods, but to Noah and Adam. On the other, the rights of the church and of churchmen were fitted into the framework of native Irish customary law, while kings were exhorted to judge justly and protect the weak.105 103 Gwynn, ‘Brian in Armagh’, 42. 104 Gwynn, ‘Brian in Armagh’, 48–9 (Note by Tomás Ó Fiaich). 105 Charles Doherty, ‘Kingship in early Ireland’ in Bhreathnach, Tara, pp 3–31, at pp 21–4; Liam Breatnach, ‘Poets and poetry’ in McCone and Simms, Progress, pp 65–77, at pp 74–6; idem, ‘The ecclesiastical element in the Old-Irish legal tract Cáin Fhuithirbe’, Peritia, 5 (1986), 36–52; Donnchadh Ó Corráin, ‘Irish origin legends and genealogy: recurrent

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From almost as early a period, we begin to have texts in Old Irish from the northern half of the country. In subject matter, these seem at first sight more likely to appeal to poets and kings than lawyers and churchmen.106 They treat of the ancient kings of Tara, of Conaire Mór, doomed to die at the hands of searaiders in the siege of Da Derga’s Hostel, in revenge for the guilt of his grandfather who had attacked a fairy mound;107 of Conn of the Hundred Battles and his son Connlae, who was lured away to a land of immortals by a fairy woman that only he could see;108 and of Conn’s vision of the kings who were to succeed him in Tara. This vision tale, in particular, may have been composed under the patronage of the Southern Uí Néill in the later seventh century, since the last intelligible name on the list of Conn’s successors is given as ‘Snechta Fína’ and this has been understood as a reference to the Tara king Fínsnechta Fledach (d.695), of the Síl nÁeda Sláine branch of the Southern Uí Néill.109 Some of the other texts in this group refer to the mythical Iron-age kingdom of Emain Macha under Conchobar mac Nessa. One relates the miraculous circumstances attending the birth of his great champion, Cú Chulainn, who is represented as indirectly fathered by the god Lug,110 and another records the prophetic words of Cú Chulainn’s supernatural female trainer, Scáthach.111 There are also four tales about an early seventh-century Ulaid prince, Mongán mac Fiachnai, who is equally credited with a miraculous birth, this time fathered by a supernatural being, Manannán mac Lír, identified in a later text as a god of the sea.112 Another tale is of a mystical voyage to the Land of the Living, aetiologies’ in Tore Nyberg et al. (eds), History and heroic tale, a symposium (Odense, 1985), pp 51–96, at pp 56–67; idem, ‘Creating the past: the early Irish genealogical traditon’ Peritia, 12 (1998), 177–208: 190–202; Kelly, Audacht, pp xxxii–xxxiii, 9–13. 106  Rudolf Thurneysen, Die irische Helden- und Königsage, pts 1 and 2 (Halle, 1921), p. 18; Proinsias Mac Cana, ‘Mongán mac Fiachna and Immram Brain’, Ériu, 23 (1972), 102–42: 102–3. 107 R.I. Best and Osborn Bergin (eds), Lebor na hUidre: Book of the Dun Cow (Dublin, 1929), pp 244– 5; Thurneysen, Die irische Helden- und Königsage, pp 622–4; Kim McCone and Pádraig Ó Fiannachta, Scéalaíocht ár Sinsear, Dán agus Tallann 3 (Maynooth, 1992), pp 63, 66; Máirín O’Daly, ‘Togail Bruidne Da Derga’ in Myles Dillon (ed.), Irish sagas (Dublin and Cork, 1968), pp 105–18, at p. 105. 108  Kim McCone (ed.), Echtrae Chonnlai and the beginnings of vernacular narrative writing in Ireland (Maynooth, 2000); T.P. Cross and C.H. Slover, Ancient Irish tales (New York, 1936, repr. 1996), pp 488–90. The tale of Connlae’s voyage to the Otherworld, and Bran’s return from thence were to form models for the better-known tale of Oisín son of Finn mac Cumaill’s voyage to Tír na nÓc, ‘the Land of Youth’. 109 Gerard Murphy, ‘‘On the dates of two sources used in Thurneysen’s Heldensage: (I) Baile Chuind and the date of Cín Dromma Snechtai’, Ériu, 16 (1952), 145–51. See, however, Bhreathnach, ‘Níell cáich úa Néill’, in Bhreathnach, Tara, pp 59–62, where she suggests that the text Baile Chuinn (‘Conn’s Vision’) was probably composed in two parts, the first during the reign of Finnachta Fledach and the second c.AD720. 110 A.G. Van Hamel, Compert Con Culainn and other stories (Dublin, 1933, repr. 1968), pp 1–6; translation in Jeffrey Gantz, Early Irish myths and sagas (London, 1981), pp 130–3. 111 Kuno Meyer (ed.), ‘Verba Scáthaige fri Coin Culaind’ in Anecdota from Irish manuscripts, 5 (Dublin, 1913), pp 28–30; Rudolf Thurneysen, ‘Verba Scáthaige nach 23 N 10’, ZCP, 9 (1913), 487–8. 112 See below, p. 63.

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or the Land of Women, by the legendary prince Bran, who meets the aforesaid Manannán driving across the sea in a chariot and hears his prophecy of the birth of Mongán, in which Mongán’s divine genesis is compared to Christ’s incarnation.113 Three of these texts are stated by later medieval scribes to have been copied from an early anthology, the Cín Dromma Snechtai or ‘Book of [the monastery of] Drumsnat’, county Monaghan, a manuscript now lost. Some of the other compositions, found associated with these items in the same later medieval manuscripts, may derive from the same source, but in any case they can be shown on linguistic grounds to belong to the earlier part of the Old Irish period, perhaps the late seventh or early eighth century.114 To the modern reader, it comes as something of a shock to be told that these tales of supernatural beings were not merely preserved in monastic manuscripts, but were apparently composed by clerics or clerically educated scholars,115 who were using inherited themes and characters from the pagan past partly to convey a Christian message through allegory, and also to magnify the reputation of the secular dynasties who were their patrons. On the basis of this early group of tales, James Carney has deduced that their Christian authors rationalized Irish society’s enduring belief in the existence of fairies, by seeing them as descendants of Adam and Eve, before they committed their transgression. They are begotten without the sexual act, and live a life of perfect peace and harmony such as would be ours had our first parents not sinned. They can see us, but we cannot see them because our perception is dimmed by the darkness of Adam’s sin (temel immorbuis Ádaim).116 On this interpretation, the imagined life of the fairies could be seen as an ideal for monks to imitate, since they too were striving to resist the body’s inheritance of Original Sin, and live together in peace and purity. The tale of Connlae’s summons from a seat among the mortal guests at his royal father’s banquet, and from his right to succeed to a human kingship, to choose instead an immortality of peace and love in the Otherworld, can be interpreted as an allegory of an Irish prince’s choice to enter a monastery, like the Tara king, Fínsnechta Fledach, who entered the clerical life in 688. On the other hand, the story of Bran, who tried to return from the Otherworld, only to find that centuries had passed in real 113 Kuno Meyer (ed.), The Voyage of Bran son of Febal to the Land of the Living (London, 1895, repr. Felinfach 1994) – four early tales of Mongán in Appendices I–IV; Nora White (ed.), Compert Mongáin and three other early Mongán tales (Maynooth, 2006); Séamas Mac Mathúna (ed.), Immram Brain: Bran’s Journey to the Land of the Women (Tübingen, 1985). See comments in Kevin Murray, The early Finn cycle (Dublin, 2017), pp 86–8. 114 McCone, Echtrae Chonnlai, pp 67–70, 119. 115 T.M. Charles-Edwards, ‘The context and uses of literacy in early Christian Ireland’ in Huw Pryce (ed.), Literacy in medieval Celtic societies (Cambridge, 1998), pp 62–82, at pp 70–4. 116 James Carney, ‘The deeper level of early Irish literature’, Capuchin Annual (1969), pp 160–71, at pp 163–4, quoted in McCone, Echtrae

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time, and he was now ‘past history’, unable to set foot on the soil of Ireland lest he die of extreme old age, could conceivably be understood as a cautionary tale against abandoning a religious vocation, as Fínsnechta Fledach did in 689, when he returned to secular life to take up his kingship once more.117 It is important to emphasize that this rosy view of the divinities of pagan times, as immortals living subject to God’s will, was only one possible approach to the theme, and is particularly found in the Cín Dromma Snechtai anthology, and similarly early texts. Another approach, taken by the king-bishop of Cashel, Cormac mac Cuilennáin (d.908/9), was to treat, for example, Manannán mac Lír as a fully historical character, a celebrated merchant who lived on the Isle of Man. He describes him as the best navigator in the western world, who could foretell good and bad weather, and it was because of this that the Irish and British called him a god of the sea, and said he was the ‘son of the sea’ (mac lír). The Isle of Man was named after him.118 Pagan divinities could also be treated, as in the tale of ‘The Second Battle of Mag Tuired’, compiled between the ninth and eleventh centuries, as historical invaders of Ireland who enjoyed supernatural powers as a result of their study of ‘occult lore and secret knowledge and diabolic arts’.119 The common view, strenuously denied by clerical scholars engaged in compiling the pseudo-historical Lebor Gabála, or ‘Book of the Taking of Ireland’, was that the immortals, the Túatha Dé Danann, or People of the Goddess Danu, were goblins or fairies, who had sailed through the air into Ireland in a cloud of mist, and still lived underground in the fairy mounds in different parts of the country.120 By including names such as Lug, and even ambiguously Manannán, among the lists of former kings of Ireland and giving them human ancestries,121 the scholars were able to keep traditions about these divinities under the control of God and the church, and to link them genealogically with their overall scheme, which traced all the royal dynasties of the Irish kings back to Milesius, a prehistoric invading warrior from Spain, who was identified as a descendant of Nemed, descended in his turn from Noah and Adam. In this scheme, the Túatha Dé Danann were also said to be descendants of Nemed.122 Not only did this ‘neutralize’ the religious implications of the persistent traditions from pre-Christian Ireland, but the alleged descent of all the Irish Chonnlai, p. 50. 117 MacAirt and MacNiocaill, Annals of Ulster, pp 150–3; John Carey, ‘On the interrelationships of some Cín Dromma Snechtai texts’, Ériu, 46 (1995), 71–92: 89; McCone, Echtrae Chonnlai, pp 118–19. 118 Kuno Meyer (ed.), Sanas Cormaic (Cormac’s Glossary) (from Anecdota from Irish Manuscripts 5, Dublin, 1913; repr. Felinfach, 1994), p. 78; John O’Donovan (trans.), Cormac’s Glossary, ed. Whitley Stokes (Calcutta, 1868), p. 114; Proinsias MacCana, Celtic mythology (rev. ed. Feltham, Middlesex, 1983), p. 70. 119 E.A. Gray (ed.), Cath Maige Tuired: the Second Battle of Mag Tuired (Naas, 1983), p. 25. 120 Gray, Cath Maige Tuired, p. 25; R.A.S. Macalister, Lebor Gabála Érenn: the Book of the Taking of Ireland (5 vols, Dublin, 1938–56), 4, pp 164–5; 212–15, 240–1. 121 Macalister, Lebor Gabála Érenn, 4, pp 101, 104–5, 120–1, 128–9, 152–3; Best, Bergin and O’Brien, The Book of Leinster, 1, pp 35–6. 122 Macalister, Lebor Gabála Érenn, 4, pp 106–7.

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nobility from one Gaelic ancestor, Milesius, fitted the Gaels into a single cultural, historical and even political framework of reference, just as Armagh had won acknowledgment by 1005 that the church in every part of the island owed a single allegiance to the primatial see of Patrick. While the Irish kings’ descent from Milesius is first seen in the seventhcentury genealogical poems from Leinster, and slightly later from Munster, these pedigrees were afterwards conflated with a legend about the successive invasions of Ireland to produce a continuous pseudo-historical narrative of Ireland’s past from Noah’s flood to their own day, the ‘Book of the Taking of Ireland’ (Lebor Gabála Érenn). The resultant pseudo-history owed much to the work of scholars associated with Armagh in the late tenth and early eleventh century, that is, the historical poet Eochaidh Úa Flainn (936–1004), who was warden of the guesthouse at Armagh, and a member of the hereditary abbatial family of Clann Sínaich,123 and Flann Mainistrech (d.1056), historian, poet and lector of Monasterboice, whose friendship with Áed Úa Forréid (d.1056), historian and bishop of Armagh, is celebrated in an anonymous poem in praise of the bishop, ‘Úasalepscop Érenn Áed’ (‘Most noble bishop of Ireland, Áed’).124 The fact that it would appear that a relative of the bishop, Cathalán Úa Foirréid, was also a historian, but located in the community of Emly, county Tipperary,125 may help to explain the widespread acceptance by scholars from every part of Ireland of the standard synthetic history prepared by these men. In particular, it is striking how the list of ‘kings of Ireland after the coming of the Faith’, prepared by the compilers of the Book of Leinster, accords with Flann Mainistrech’s list of the kings of Tara from Lóegaire to Máelsechlainn II (d.1022), Rig Themra toebaige iar tain, both of them giving the Uí Néill a virtual monopoly of the title, until the coming of Brian Boru and the era of the ‘kings of Ireland with opposition’.126 ‘The Book of the Taking of Ireland’ was designed from the outset to include all provinces in its narrative. Similarly, although they may once have been chiefly relevant to the north and midlands of Ireland, the so-called ‘Conn’s Half ’ (Leth Chuinn), legends associated with the Tara kingship, had come to be accepted as involving the whole island as a result both of the increased power of the Uí Néill, 123  This is to follow John Carey in making the probable but unproven identification of Eochaid Ua Flainn with the Armagh sage Eochaid Ua Flannacáin (Flannacán being a diminutive of Flann); Carey, A new introduction to Lebor Gabála Érenn: the Book of the Taking of Ireland (London, 1993), p. [5]; see now Carey, ‘Learning, imagination and belief ’ in The Cambridge history of Ireland, I, p. 67, note 56. In any case the poet Eochaid Ua Flainn suggests his association with Armagh by the reverence with which he treats St Patrick; Macalister, Lebor Gabála Érenn, 4, pp 280–1. See also Ó Fiaich, ‘The church of Armagh under lay control’, 75–127: 111. 124 Gerard Murphy (ed.), ‘A poem in praise of Aodh Ua Foirréidh, bishop of Armagh (1032–1056)’ in Silvester O’Brien (ed.), Measgra i gcuimhne Mhíchíl Uí Chléirigh (Dublin, 1944), pp 140–64. 125  MacAirt and MacNiocaill, Annals of Ulster, pp 496–7, 522–3. 126 Best, Bergin and O’Brien, The Book of Leinster, 1, pp 94–98; R.I. Best

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in the ninth and early tenth centuries, and of the intellectual dominance of the Louth/Armagh school of history, associated with Flann Mainistrech, in the eleventh. They formed two powerful and enduring strands of mythology, binding the province of Ulster into the history of Ireland as a whole. One might have thought that the legend of the ‘Three Collas’, as mythical ancestors of the Airgíalla, would remain relevant only to the kingdoms of Airgíalla, but it included two aspects that proved attractive to areas outside Ulster. One was the ancient poem on the rights of the Airgíalla kingdoms vis-àvis their Uí Néill overlords, which formed a model of minimal submission, and was later interpreted as the list of privileges for their descendants won from King Muiredach Tírech by the ‘Three Collas’ in exchange for renouncing their claim to the high-kingship.127 The Uí Maine of Connacht, a kingdom in east county Galway and south Roscommon ruled by the O’Kelly (Ó Cellaig) family in the high Middle Ages, possessed a genealogy which traced their rulers back to Domnall son of Fiacha Sraibtine, a brother of the Tara king Muiredach Tírech, thus making them distant kin to the Uí Néill, north and south. However, between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, they jettisoned this pedigree in favour of an alternative descent from one of the ‘Three Collas’, Fiacha Sraibtine’s assassins, in this case Colla fo Chrí.128 By virtue of this descent, they claimed that the king of Connacht should allow the Uí Maine every privilege that the written record stated the Uí Néill had allowed to the Airgialla,129 though the text on which the Uí Maine tract relied was probably the abbreviated account of Airgialla privileges relayed by the late eleventh-century ‘Book of Rights (Lebor na Cert)’ rather than the original Old Irish poem.130 The second feature of the legend that attracted outside interest was the status of the ‘Three Collas’ on their return from exile in Scotland, as battle leaders in the service of the king of Tara. This led, in the mid-fourteenth century, to the development of a genealogy that traced all the imported Scottish mercenary leaders, or constables of the galloglass, who were descended from the twelfth-century Hebridean chief and M.A. O’Brien (eds), The Book of Leinster, 3 (Dublin, 1957), pp 509–15. 127 See Knott, Tadhg Dall, poem no. 9, verses 8–36. This is a late sixteenth-century exposition of the legend. An earlier, probably thirteenth-century poem, ‘Na trí Colla Clann Eathach’ in RIA MS 744 (A/v/2) f. 59a, is unpublished. It is addressed to Muirchertach Mac Domnaill Uí Airt (MacDonnell), king of Dartraighe in county Monaghan and its first line is cited in Osborn Bergin (ed.), ‘Irish grammatical tracts I’, Ériu, 8 (1915), suppl., p. 61, suggesting it was once well-known. It too links the privileges of the Airgialla with the story of the Three Collas, and may have supplied the inspiration for another unpublished poem on the same theme, ‘Éist re seanchas Síol cColla’ in ABM, pp 276–8, no. 211, composed in 1588 for the Connacht galloglass commander Mac Marcuis Meic Domnaill (a MacDonnell or MacDonald from Scotland, see below, p. 66, note 131). 128 Corp. Gen. Hib., pp 130, 133, 153; John O’Donovan (ed.), The tribes and customs of Hy-Many (Dublin, 1843), pp 24–5. 129 O’Donovan, The tribes and customs of Hy-Many, pp 66–7. 130 Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, ‘Nósa Ua Maine: fact or fiction?’ in T.M. Charles-Edwards, M.E. Owen and Paul Russell (eds), The Welsh king and his

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Somerled, to Colla Úais, a pedigree that was to be accepted and repeated by fifteenth-century Scottish genealogists.131 The original Ulster cycle, the tales of the champions Cú Chulainn and Conall Cernach, and their king, Conchobar mac Nessa, who was said to have ruled the whole province of Ulster from his palace at Emain Macha long ago, before Christ was crucified, appealed to the other regions of Ireland on two levels. In terms of literature, it was the most fully developed and prestigious of the saga cycles. The Táin Bó Cúailgne or ‘Cattle Raid of Cooley’ was Ireland’s only full-length epic tale, quite possibly composed on such an extended scale in imitation of classical epics.132 The legend, preserved in the Book of Leinster, that the earliest complete version of the Táin had been taken to the Continent in exchange for the text of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae,133 elevates the text to the status of a national treasure, of interest not merely to the whole of Ireland, but even to foreign scholars. On the other hand, the status of the Ulaid themselves, since the rise of the Uí Néill dynasty, provided a paradigm that had relevance to a number of other peoples around Ireland, who wished to emphasize their independence from a dominant neighbouring dynasty. Since the Battle of Mag Roth in 637, the Ulaid had been confined to the approximate area of the modern counties of Antrim and Down, together with the territory of Conaille Muirtheimne in north Louth, which was transferred to the Ó Cerbaill kings of Airgialla after the eleventh century.134 Yet, they remained defiant, constantly rebelling against attempts of the Northern Uí Néill to bring them under the over-kingdom of Ailech. The subjection of the Airgialla to the kings of Cenél nEógain after the Battle of Leth Cam in 827 had also entailed the defeat of Muiredach son of Echaid, king of the Ulaid, putting eastern Ulster under additional pressure to submit, and its plight was increased at this time by repeated raids from the Vikings.135 Yet it is precisely at this period that the Annals of Ulster change the title of the defeated king, Muiredach son of Echaid, from ‘king of Ulaid’ in 827, to ‘king of Conchobar’s Province’ or ‘Conchobar’s Fifth’ at his death in 839. To name the ruler of the Ulaid ‘king of Conchobar’s Fifth of Ireland’, during a period of court (Cardiff, 2000), pp 362–81, at pp 374–6. 131 The earliest record of Colla Uais as the ancestor of Somerled comes in the unpublished genealogical collection compiled c.1344–5 and transcribed by Adhamh Ó Cianáin in NLI MS G 2, f. 25v (26v). The earliest Scottish genealogies of the MacDonalds and their relatives are found in NLS MS 72/1/1, dating c.1450 or 1467, with the pedigree linking their line to Colla Uais beginning on f. 2, col. 3, line 1. 132 Ruairí Ó hUiginn, ‘The background and development of the Táin Bó Cúailgne’ in J.P. Mallory (ed.), Aspects of the Táin (Belfast, 1992), pp 29–67, at pp 32–41. 133 James Carney, Studies in Irish literature and history (Dublin, 1955), p. 166; Thomas Kinsella, The Táin (Oxford, 1970), pp 1–2. See McCone, Pagan past, p. 201. 134 Pádraig Ó Maolagáin, ‘Uí Chremthainn and Fir Fernmaige’, Journal of the County Louth Archaeological Society, 11 (1947), 157–63: 159–63; L.P. Murray, ‘The Pictish kingdom of Connaille-Muirthemne’ in Féilsgríbhinn Eóin Mhic Néill, pp 445–53, at pp 451–3. 135 MacAirt and MacNiocaill, Annals

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submission and military service to the Uí Néill high-kings, surely indicates a compensatory emphasis on the past glories of their predecessor, the prehistoric and legendary Conchobar mac Nessa, the most powerful king in Ireland in his own time, whose kingdom was said to stretch from the Drowes to the Boyne. Though this heritage was no longer theirs, the Ulaid had not surrendered their theoretical claim to its restoration.136 The same grandiose title was applied to Muiredach’s successors: to King Matudán, when he came with all his nobles to attend a council with the powerful Southern Uí Néill high-king Máelsechnaill I in 851, and to Áed son of Eochucán in 919, when he died fighting in the army of the Northern Uí Néill high-king, Níall Glúndub, against the Vikings.137 In general, the Milesian genealogical framework for the pedigrees of the kings of Ireland, as systematized in the great prose compilations preserved in the twelfth-century Book of Leinster and Rawlinson B 502, groups dynasties by region and political allegiance as descended from one or other of the sons of Milesius or Míl, considered as the first Gaels to land in Ireland. The Uí Néill, Connachta and Airgialla were traced to Eremón son of Míl, the Eoganachta and Dál gCais of Munster to Éber son of Míl. The Dál nAraide kings of the Ulaid, however, emphasized their independence by claiming descent from a separate son of Míl or Milesius, called Ír. From a surprisingly early period, a number of small population groups in Connacht and Munster claimed descent from the Ulaid and from Ír also, through the champion of the Ulster cycle, Fergus mac Róich, who was said to have been exiled from Ulster for fourteen years with his sons and followers, and to have become the ancestor of, among others, the Cíarraige and Conmaicne of Connacht, the Cíarraige Luachra of Kerry and the inhabitants of Fermoy, county Cork.138 The resulting prestige, shed on dynasties which, in practice, possessed little political power, is epitomized in the fifteenthcentury poem addressed to O’Conor Kerry (Ó Conchobair Ciarraige) by the Sligo author Tadc Óc Ó hUicinn (or O’Higgin): Far from the Ulaidh now is their heir, if we trace aright the pedigree … For long past no king of Ulaidh stock has held the province of Ulaidh; Eoghan’s race was established there, strangers in their place … The House of red-haired Macha is covered by a sheet of green grass; woods and trees are where Emain stood; where is its lord? … The province of Ulaidh is the true land of west Munster’s King … Ó Conchobhair – note it well – is heir to the Ultaigh; when shall we crown Ros’s scion, true heir of Fearghus’ race?139 of Ulster, pp 284–91. 136 Byrne, Irish kings, p. 107; Myles Dillon (ed.), Lebor na Cert: The Book of Rights (Dublin, 1962), pp 130–1; Byrne, ‘Clann Ollamain Uaisle Emna’, 54, note 1; Máire Herbert, ‘Fled Dúin na nGéd: a reappraisal’, CMCS, 18 (Winter 1989), 75–87: 86. 137 MacAirt and MacNiocaill, Annals of Ulster, pp 296–7, 310–11, 368–9. 138 Ó hUiginn, ‘Fergus, Russ and Rudraige’, pp 34–5; Corp. Gen. Hib., p. 279; O’Rahilly, Early Irish history and mythology, p. 120. 139 Aithd., 2, pp 17–18.

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In this way, the saga cycle, which in origin celebrated the sturdy independence of the Ulaid and their ancestors’ successful defence of the province from invasion by the rest of Ireland, came to be embraced by all parts of the island as a common cultural heritage, and an ideal of nobility to which other proud but petty royal dynasties could aspire. Even the tales of Mongán, which dealt with a prince from the later, reduced territory of the Ulaid, and thus had less interest for political propagandists, passed into the shared literary repertoire of the Irish men of learning, giving rise to the more purely entertaining late medieval tale of Mongán’s conception and courtship of Dub Lacha found in the fifteenthcentury Book of Fermoy (county Cork).140 This unity of medieval Gaelic literature was one of its most remarkable features. It was accessible without dialect differences to courts and learned classes from the south of Ireland to the west of Scotland. The freedom of the men of learning to wander from one petty kingdom to another, without losing the protection of the law, spread knowledge of the most important sagas throughout this linguistic area, and from the end of the tenth century, systematic lists were drawn up of the repertoire of tales that could be expected of a master-poet or historian.141 The very early development of secular sagas in Ulster gave the literature of that region a head-start, so to speak, and allowed the Ulster cycle of tales to attain the same kind of literary predominance across Ireland as a whole that the see of Armagh had won inside the Irish church, and that the Uí Néill kingship of Tara long held in the political arena. The high-kingship of Munster’s Brian Boru (Brian Bóruma), however, was to usher in a period of major change in the political, religious and even literary fields.

140 Meyer, The Voyage of Bran, pp 58–84. medieval Ireland (Dublin, 1980), pp 33–9.

141 Proinsias Mac Cana, The learned tales of

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CHAPTER

2

Eleventh to twelfth centuries: Ulster’s growing isolation The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw shattering changes take place in Ulster and, indeed, in Ireland as a whole. The sudden rise of the Munsterman Brian Boru to rule the whole island 1002–14, as ‘Emperor of the Irish’, had irreversibly altered the traditional framework within which power was supposed to be exercised. The term ‘king of Tara’ ceased to have any national significance after 1022, and was kept as a courtesy title by the descendants of Máelsechlainn II, the O’Melaghlin (Ó Máelsechlainn) southern Uí Néill kings of Meath,1 while the law schools laboured to define the distinction between a ‘king of Ireland with opposition’ and a ‘king of Ireland without opposition’. Jurists writing in the interest of Brian Boru’s descendants, the O’Briens (Uí Briain), claimed that ‘a king of Ireland without opposition’ must hold the three harbours of Dublin, Limerick and Waterford,2 demonstrating the new political and economic importance to Ireland of the Viking sea-ports around the southern and eastern coasts. Following the success of the AD866 campaigns of Aed Findliath, there were no Viking trading posts of comparable significance along the Ulster coast, marginalizing the northern province’s economic role. Not only had political control of Dublin come to replace possession of Tara as a necessary first step to supreme power,3 but the new diocesan see of Dublin in the late eleventh century was threatening to take over from Armagh as metropolitan head of the Irish church.4 Even in the field of literature, a flourishing school of Munster poets and historians in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries produced the magisterial ‘Book of Rights’, cataloguing the tributes and privileges of all the local kings in Ireland, and opening with the uncompromising statement that Cashel in Tipperary, rather than Armagh, was 1 Gearóid Mac Niocaill (ed.), Notitiae as Leabhar Cheanannais, 1033–1161 ([Dublin] 1961), pp 12–13; John O’Donovan (ed.), ‘The Irish Charters in the Book of Kells’ in John O’Donovan (ed.), Miscellany of the Irish Archaeological Society (Dublin, 1846), pp 127–58, at pp 130–1, 140–1, charters no. 2 and 4. 2  Katharine Simms, ‘The contents of later commentaries on the Brehon law tracts’, Ériu, 49 (1998), 23–40: 32–5, and see Bergin, Best and Ó Briain, The Book of Leinster, 1, pp 98–9; Ann. Clonm., pp 176–7. 3 Byrne, Irish kings, p. 271. 4 Martin Holland, ‘Dublin and the reform of the Irish church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries’, Peritia, 14 (2000), 111–60: 111–27.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages Patrick’s sanctuary and the principal stronghold of the king of Ireland. And the rent and service of the men of Ireland is due to the king of that place always, namely to the king of Cashel through the blessing of Patrick, son of Calpurnius’.5

Two major prose works from Munster in this period, ‘The War of the Irish with the Foreigners’ (Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh), exalting Brian Boru, and ‘The Battle-career of Cellachán of Cashel’ (Caithréim Chellacháin Chaisil),6 assured the men of Ireland that they owed their delivery from the Viking menace to the ancestors of the O’Brien and MacCarthy (Mac Carthaig) dynasties respectively. Ulster was becoming a backwater.

R E P L AC E M E N T O F O ’ N E I L L P ROV I N C I A L K I N G S B Y T H E M AC L AU G H L I N DY N A S T Y

Inside the northern province, even the over-kingdom of Ailech began to disintegrate. It had been part of Brian Boru’s ‘divide and conquer’ policy to form direct bonds of homage and fidelity with the kings of Ulaid and Tír Conaill, diverting them away from their allegiance, such as it was, to the Cenél Eógain ‘king of the North’.7 After the death of King Brian, slain by Vikings at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, and the natural demise of Máelsechlainn II, king of Tara, in 1022, the Cenél Eógain ruler, Flaithbertach an Trostain O’Neill (‘Flaithbertach of the Pilgrim’s Staff’), made some raids into the midlands in an apparent attempt to claim leadership of all the Uí Néill, north and south, but was frustrated by the counterclaims of Donnchad, son of Brian Boru.8 Flaithbertach and his son Áed O’Neill also jointly fought to achieve supremacy over the Cenél Conaill (the Donegal branch of the Northern Uí Néill) and the Ulaid, and in 1030, Flaithbertach, now ‘king of the North’, felt sufficiently secure to go on pilgrimage to Rome for a year, transferring kingship to Áed, his son.9 However, the death of the young king Áed in 1033, three years before his father, apparently threw the dynastic succession into confusion. Despite some daring and deliberate falsification of the records by the genealogists of the day,10 it seems clear that, for the rest of the eleventh and most of the twelfth century, the rulers of Cenél Eógain were descendants of Domnall Dabaill, the brother of Niall Glúndub. (see Fig. 6) 5 Dillon, Lebor na Cert, p. 5. 6 Todd, Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh; Alexander Bugge (ed.), Caithréim Chellacháin Chaisil (Christiania [Oslo], 1905). 7 AI, pp 178–81. 8 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster, pp 462–3. 9 Ibid., pp 464–9. 10 Ó Ceallaigh, Gleanings, pp 73–87; Katharine Simms, ‘Tír Eoghain “North of the Mountain”’ in Derry: Hist. & Soc., pp 149–73, at pp 151 and 169–70 note 12; Donnchadh Ó Corráin, ‘Muirchertach MacLochlainn and the Circuit of Ireland’ in A.P. Smyth (ed.), Seanchas, pp 238–50, at pp 247–50.

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While Niall Glúndub’s descendants had ruled as over-kings of the Northern Uí Néill, using the surname O’Neill to emphasize their direct descent from Niall Glúndub, the descendants of his brother Domnall Dabaill had hitherto ruled only as subordinate kings in and around the dynasty’s original homeland of the Inishowen peninsula. They now extended their jurisdiction southwards, reducing the O’Neill branch from over-kings to local chieftains of the cantred of Telach Óc,11 the area between the modern Cookstown and Dungannon in county Tyrone, which had once belonged to the Airgialla kings of Uí Thuirtre. This contained the significant hilltop enclosure of Telach Óc, now Tullyhogue (see Plate IV), which is identified in the late eleventh-century ‘Book of Rights’ as the inauguration site of the Northern Uí Néill.12 Hogan argues that it was presumably in earlier days a royal site with significance for all the Airgialla, and not just the Uí Thuirtre, since it was important enough to persuade the Uí Néill to exchange the hilltop fort of Ailech on Inishowen, from which they derived their title, for this newly acquired place of inauguration. Telach Óc was already described as part of Tír Eógain (‘land of Eógan’, giving rise to the modern ‘Tyrone’), rather than Airgialla, in an annal entry for 1012. It may even have served as the location for the royal ‘ordination’ of Áed Craíbe Telcha O’Neill by the ‘heir of St Patrick’, which the Annals of Ulster record in 993.13 Ailech, the drystone hillfort on the peninsula of Inishowen, centre of a subkingship in the tenth century, also gave rise to a title signifying over-king of the Northern Uí Néill, in the same way that Tara had once implied over-kingship of all the Uí Néill, north and south (see Plate V). Niall, son of Máelsechnaill (fl. 1044–61), was the first over-king of Ailech to come from the Cenél Eógain of Inishowen (Cenél Eógain na hInnse), the longovershadowed line of Domnall Dabaill, son of the northern high-king Áed Findliath (d.879). During Niall’s reign, his nephew Ardgar, son of Lochlainn son of Máelsechnaill, held the subordinate kingship of Telach Óc (Tullyhogue) for a time, before being expelled by the O’Neills, the displaced royal line of Niall Glúndub, son of Áed Findliath. Ardgar’s descendants were to take the surname ‘Úa Lochlainn’ (‘grandson of Lochlainn’) or ‘Mac Lochlainn’ (‘son of Lochlainn’ – ‘MacLaughlin’ in Anglicized spelling). In general, Irish surnames such as O’Neill, MacLaughlin, O’Brien and MacCarthy were just beginning to emerge, identifying direct royal lines from wider kinship groups, at this point in history. Ardgar remained militarily active after his expulsion, raiding against his opponents in south Tír Eógain and against the Ulaid kingdom of Dál Araide, and succeeded his uncle as ‘over-king of Ailech’ in 1061. In 1063, he dominated 11 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster, pp 490–1, 500–1, 506–7; see James Hogan, ‘The Uí Briain kingship in Telach Óc’ in Féilsgríbhinn Eóin Mhic Néill, pp 406–44, at p. 423; Anthony Candon, ‘Telach Óc and Emain Macha c.1100’, Emania, 15 (1996), 39–46: 40–1. 12 Dillon, Lebor na Cert, pp 64–5. 13 Hogan, ‘The Uí Briain kingship in Telach Óc’, pp 420–3. The king’s nickname means ‘Aed of [the Battle of] Crew Hill’, from the event

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the Cenél Conaill and received submission from a number of Connacht kings. When he died in 1064, it was in Telach Óc, and he was buried in the ‘mausoleum of the kings’ at Armagh,14 a sign that he had successfully imposed his authority over the southern branches of the Cenél Eógain, including the descendants of Niall Glúndub and their followers, by that time. Ardgar Mac Lochlainn’s ascent to the over-kingship of Ailech initiated a political eclipse for the O’Neills, which would last for nearly a century. At first glance, it might seem of very little significance whether the dominant kingdom in Ulster was ruled by an O’Neill, descended from Niall Glúndub (d.919), or a MacLaughlin, descended from Niall’s brother, Domnall Dabaill (d.915). However, the O’Neill branch of the Northern Uí Néill dynasty had become increasingly associated with the southern half of Ulster, and with the primatial see at Armagh, and their claims to the over-kingship of Tara had brought them into close confrontation with the Viking kingdom of Dublin. The MacLaughlin branch of the Uí Néill, as kings of Ailech, acquired more northerly interests. Their associations were with Tír Conaill (Donegal), Scotland, the Isle of Man and the monastic church of St Columba at Derry. When the rest of Ireland was increasingly affected, during the twelfth century, by new ideas from England and the Continent, bringing changes in church organization, architecture and urban development, the MacLaughlin kings were among the least responsive.

C A R E E R O F D O M N A L L M AC L AU G H L I N

From 1064 to 1083, three other princes of Domnall Dabaill’s line succeeded Ardgar MacLaughlin in the kingdom of Ailech. During this period, an exiled prince from Munster, Conchobar O’Brien (d.1078), was strangely appointed king of Telach Óc. In spite of being a great-grandson of Brian Boru, Conchobar was an enemy and rival of the reigning Munster high-king, Toirdelbach O’Brien. The full story behind this episode will never be known, but Ardgar MacLaughlin’s son Domnall was married to Bébinn, Conchobar O’Brien’s niece, so it would seem that the exiled Conchobar formed a military alliance with the line of Domnall Dabaill and was appointed by them to the kingship of Telach Óc (Tullyhogue), to keep the O’Neill descendants of Niall Glúndub out of power. Bébinn’s sister Sadb was married to Donnsléibe Úa hEochada (d.1091), king of  Ulaid, whose descendants were to take the surname MacDonleavy (Mac Duinnsléibe), and another sister was married to Ruaidri O’Rogan (Úa Rúadacáin, d.1099), the Airgiallan king of Airthir in the modern county of Armagh.15 (See Plate III). which caused his death in 1004. 14 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster, pp 488–91, 496–501. 15 Hogan, ‘The Uí Briain kingship in Telach Óc’, p. 434; Candon, ‘Telach

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The O’Brien kingship of Telach Óc ended with the violent death of King Conchobar at the hands of yet another branch of the Cenél Eógain, the Cenél Binnig of the Glen, associated with Glenconkeine in county Derry. However in 1083, Bébinn’s husband Domnall MacLaughlin took kingship over all branches of the Cenél Eógain, and began a long campaign to restore the authority of the kingdom of Ailech over the rest of Ulster, to become effectively ‘king of the North’. Exploiting the preceding period of civil war among the Cenél Eógain, the Ulaid had expanded their power. In 1084, the Ulaid king, Donnsléibe Úa hEochada, received the submission of King Donnchad O’Rourke (Ó Ruairc) of Breifne. Domnall MacLaughlin, however, had already taken submission from the Airgialla kingdom of Fernmag (county Monaghan and part of Louth) in 1083, the year of his accession. After a series of attacks on the Ulaid, he killed Donnsléibe Úa hEochada in 1091, and in 1099 symbolically crushed the Ulaid claim to independence by hewing down the Cráeb Telcha, the venerated tree that grew on Crew Hill, the inauguration site of the kings of Ulaid.16 Máire Herbert has shown how the late eleventh- or early twelfth-century saga ‘Fled Dúin na nGéd’, ‘The Banquet of Dún na nGéd’ can be seen to draw a parallel to Domnall MacLaughlin’s assertion of a paternal authority over the rebellious Ulaid, when it represents the Battle of Mag Roth in AD637 as the outcome of the unreasonable revolt of the Ulaid ruler Congal Cáech against his foster-father, the Tara king Domnall mac Áeda maic Ainmerech.17 Domnall MacLaughlin was equally ruthless against the Cenél Conaill in county Donegal, blinding their king, Áed O’Cannon (Úa Canannáin), in 1093, while in 1088 he allied with the provincial king of Connacht, Ruaidri O’Conor (Ó Conchobair), to invade the territory of the new Munster high-king, Muirchertach O’Brien, where he burned the city of Limerick and razed the O’Brien palace of Kincora to the ground.18 It was presumably these exploits that provided legal commentators in this period, writing in the northern interest, with their argument that a ruler might justly claim to be king of Ireland ‘with opposition’ even if he has only one province in Ireland, if he takes his troops safely out of every other province, as did Conchobhar [mac Nessa], he gets the honour-price of a king with opposition.19 This open challenge to the southern ‘high-king with opposition’ brought about a series of confrontations between the armies of MacLaughlin and Óc and Emain Macha’, p. 42. 16 Deirdre Flanagan, ‘Cráeb Telcha: Crew, Co. Antrim’, Dinnshenchas, 4:2 (1970), 29–32. 17 Herbert, ‘Fled Dúin na nGéd’. See above, pp 46–8, 56, 66–7, note 136. 18 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster, pp 516–37; AI, pp 240–3. 19 Simms, ‘The contents of later commentaries’, 34.

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O’Brien, ten in all, though these seldom resulted in outright war, thanks to the mediation of successive hereditary ‘heirs of Patrick’, or ecclesiastical rulers of Armagh drawn from the Clann Sínaich, whose personal authority was reinforced by possession of the holiest relic in Ireland, the Bachall Ísa, or ‘Staff of Jesus’, reputed to have been St Patrick’s crozier.20 Domnall MacLaughlin continued his ancestors’ traditional patronage of Armagh and the Clann Sínaich, presenting the community c.1100 with the magnificent jewelled cover that still enshrines the relic known as St Patrick’s Bell.21 (See Plate VI) The Munster king Muirchertach O’Brien, like his ancestor Brian Boru, found that he too had to court the favour of the ‘heirs of Patrick’. Motivated also by a political disagreement with the English king, Henry I, Muirchertach abandoned the Canterbury blueprint for a reform of the Irish church (to be headed by a metropolitan archbishopric of Dublin), in favour of an independent Irish hierarchy under the primacy of Armagh.22 Six weeks after the death in 1105 of Domnall of Clann Sínaich, unordained abbot of Armagh, his great-nephew and successor, Cellach, received priest’s orders, and shortly afterwards, significantly while on visitation in Munster, he was consecrated bishop. At the Synod of Rath Breasail, held in Munster under the aegis of Muirchertach O’Brien in 1111, it was decided to divide the Irish church into two provinces, under archbishops of Cashel and Armagh, with primacy accorded to the northern church.23 It could be argued that the MacLaughlins’ recent revival of military power in Ulster had supplied Armagh with the necessary political importance to hold onto its time-honoured position of leadership within the Irish church, despite the rival claims of Dublin and Cashel, where the irresistible movement towards church reform had taken root long before it reached the North. Three years later, King Muirchertach O’Brien fell sick, and was deposed against his will by his ambitious brother Diarmait. Taking advantage of the confusion in Munster, Domnall MacLaughlin brought a great army southward that included, as well as the Cenél Eógain, the forces of the newly reconquered Ulaid, the men of Tír Conaill under the kingship of his own son Niall Mac Laughlin, together with the armies of Breifne under O’Rourke and of Meath under O’Melaghlin. This broad-based hosting of northerners then invaded Munster in alliance with the young king of Connacht, Toirdelbach O’Conor, thus completing the mustered forces of ‘Conn’s Half ’ of Ireland. The 1114 20 Anthony Candon, ‘Barefaced effrontery: secular and ecclesiastical politics in early twelfthcentury Ireland’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 14:2 (1991), 1–38: 9, 13, 22–3; Ó Fiaich, ‘The church of Armagh under lay control’, 93–4. 21 Michael Ryan (ed.), Treasures of Ireland: Irish art, 3000 BC to 1500 AD (Dublin, 1983), pp 167–8; P.E. Micheli, ‘The inscriptions on pre-Norman Irish reliquaries’, PRIA, 96C (1996), 1–48: 22–3. 22 Holland, ‘Dublin and the reform of the Irish church’, 128–40; Candon, ‘Barefaced effrontery’. 23 John MacErlean, ‘The Synod of Raith Bressail’, Archivium Hibernicum, 3 (1914), 1–33; Aubrey Gwynn, The Irish church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, ed. Gerard O’Brien (Dublin, 1992), pp 180–92; Holland,

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expedition could be seen as an occasion when Domnall MacLaughlin’s claim to rival O’Brien as ‘high-king of Ireland with opposition’ had some reality, but although the annals say it was a destructive campaign, it ended in an indecisive truce with the temporary king of Munster, Diarmait O’Brien, brokered by Toirdelbach O’Conor ‘in spite of Conn’s Half ’, that is, in defiance of MacLaughlin’s wishes.24 The struggle for power within Munster was to continue between the partially recovered Muirchertach O’Brien and his brother Diarmait until Muirchertach’s death in 1119, but the political advantages to be gained from the ensuing power vacuum at the top went not to the distant, and by now elderly, king of the North, Domnall MacLaughlin, but to the young, neighbouring king of Connacht, Toirdelbach O’Conor.25 In 1120, Toirdelbach defied the age-old traditions of the Tara kingship and the allied forces of MacLaughlin and O’Melaghlin by entering Meath and presiding over the Fair of Tailtiu there, the traditional privilege of  the  Uí Néill high-king. Next year, the seventy-three-year-old Domnall MacLaughlin died. While the Annals of Ulster call him ‘high-king of Ireland’ and the Annals of Inisfallen ‘king of Ireland’, the Connacht Annals of Tigernach style him more ambiguously and more accurately ‘king of the North of Ireland, and the taker of Erin’s hostages’.26

SUCCESSION DISPUTES AND REBELLION: AN END TO H E R E D I TA RY C O A R B S I N A R M A G H

Domnall MacLaughlin left behind him a number of sons, but his heir-apparent Niall, who held the kingship of neighbouring Tír Conaill (Donegal) in his father’s lifetime, had already been slain in 1119, and this may have contributed to the succession disputes that broke out in the MacLaughlin family and continued for the next twenty years or so. At the same time, the dynasty’s hold on north-western Tír Eógain was challenged by the repeated rebellions of Domnall O’Gormley (Ó Gairmledaig), regional king of Cenél Múáin, located in the Mourne–Shrule river basin between the modern Castlefinn and Newtownstewart.27 (See Plate III). There is no explicit record of the grounds for O’Gormley’s constant hostility to MacLaughlin rule, but his kingdom lay immediately to the south of their homeland of Inishowen, and it seems likely that he felt his hold on his own territory threatened by their rise to power. ‘Dublin and the reform of the Irish church’, 142–6. 24 Ann. Tig., p. 338 [34]. 25 Donncha Ó Corráin, Ireland before the Normans, The Gill History of Ireland 2 (Dublin, 1972), pp 148–53; John Ryan, Toirdelbach O Conchubair, 1088–1156: king of Connacht, king of Ireland ‘co fresabra’ (O’Donnell lecture, Dublin, 1966), pp 5–7. 26 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster, pp 564–5; AI, pp 280–1; Ann. Tig., p. 345 [41]. 27 Katharine Simms, ‘The origins of the diocese of Clogher’, Clogher Record, 10:2 (1980), 180–98: 196–7; Simms, ‘Tír Eoghain “North of the Mountain”’, pp 151–2.

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This period of weakness in the over-kingdom of the North served the interests of church reform, because it allowed the clerical reformers to end Clann Sínaich’s hereditary grip on the primatial see of Armagh, despite the political backing of their Cenél Eógain overlords. All had gone well during the term of office of Archbishop Cellach, who was able to wield exceptional influence by combining his family’s traditional claims to hold office as coarb (‘heir of Patrick’) and guardian of the relics, with his canonically correct celibacy and bishop’s orders. Not only did Cellach continue the heir of Patrick’s traditional role as peacemaker between the warring provincial kings of Ireland; he made frequent pastoral visits to the churches in Leinster and Munster, and demonstrated his support of the new Continental-style monasticism by consecrating the abbey of Saints Peter and Paul in Armagh, and asking to be buried in the monastery of Lismore near Waterford when he fell sick and died during a visitation of Munster in 1129.28 However, his death highlighted the incomplete nature of the reform so far, because his authority as ecclesiastical ruler of Armagh was immediately assumed by another member of Clann Sínaich, Muirchertach, although St Bernard of Clairvaux, in his ‘Life of St Malachy of Armagh’, claims that Cellach himself was anxious to break the hereditary succession and recommended instead the appointment of Malachy, or Máel M’Áedóc Ó Morgair, son of a former lector of Armagh, and reforming bishop of Connor diocese. While Malachy was urged to take up this office by the two kings of southern and northern Munster, Cormac MacCarthy and Conchobar O’Brien, both of whom were identified with the reform movement, the lay abbot Muirchertach of the Clann Sínaich was supported by the Cenél Eógain. He went on a visitation of Tír Eógain in 1133 and blessed the inhabitants, who duly paid him a tribute of cows and horses.29 Until the death of this Muirchertach, in 1134, Malachy was forced to exercise what pastoral functions he could from a base outside Armagh city. When the elderly Muirchertach died, the late Archbishop Cellach’s own brother, Niall of the Clann Sínaich, claimed the right to succeed to St Patrick’s authority. The Annals of Tigernach tell us Niall was supported by the Cenél Eógain of Telach Óc, who even conspired to assassinate Malachy, until twelve of them were struck by lightning. St Bernard, in his ‘Life of Malachy’, adds that the conspirators also intended to kill a certain unnamed king who came together with the ‘bishops and faithful of the land’ to install Malachy. This king, he said, took hostages of ‘a certain prince, of the more powerful of the unrighteous race’ [of Clann Sínaich?] to guarantee the maintenance of peace, before returning to his home and leaving Malachy in danger of a renewed assassination attempt, happily averted by his faith and humility.30 Later in the year, Malachy ended the claims of Niall of the Clann Sínaich by purchasing his symbol of authority, the Bachall Ísa or ‘Staff of Jesus’. Then, in 1136, perhaps to appease the hostility of 28 Aidan Breen, ‘Cellach (Celsus)’ in DIB, 2, pp 448–9. 29 AFM 2, pp 1022–43. 30 Ann. Tig., p. 366 [152]; H.J. Lawlor, trans., St Bernard of Clairvaux’s Life of St Malachy of Armagh

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the Cenél Eógain, Malachy retired from the primacy to become bishop of Down, making way for the celibate and duly consecrated Derry cleric, Gilla mac Liag, or Gelasius. The principle of hereditary succession was at an end. In view of the recorded support of the Cenél Eógain for Malachy’s Clann Sínaich rivals, Aubrey Gwynn has plausibly speculated that the king who used the threat of force to install Malachy in Armagh was Donnchad O’Carroll (Ó Cerbaill), king of Fernmag in the Monaghan area, who was now beginning to monopolize the title ‘king of Airgialla’, since the other former kingdoms of the Airgialla federation were rapidly being subsumed into Tír Eógain. O’Carroll is on record as a promoter of church reform,31 but Gwynn further argued that his political backing for Malachy came at a price, the price of giving away half the Armagh diocese, transferring the southern end to Clogher diocese (see Plate III). Shortly after Malachy’s own installation in the see of Armagh by O’Carroll, in 1135 or 1136, Malachy’s brother Christian Ó Morgair became bishop of Clogher, covering the area of O’Carroll’s kingdom, and forthwith moved his diocesan see from Clogher to Louth. Modern county Louth presently forms the southern end of the diocese of Armagh, and it was already claimed as part of Patrick’s ‘vast sanctuary lands’ in the seventh-century Book of the Angel. Christian Ó Morgair was only able to set up his ecclesiastical headquarters in Louth because Malachy had surrendered this part of his diocese to the see of Clogher, or Airgialla, in the same way that the Airgiallan king O’Carroll and his immediate predecessors had annexed the Louth area’s secular territories of Fir Rois and Conaille Muirthemne.32 This loss of the valuable southern part of the lands claimed by the church of Armagh was to cause prolonged disputes in the first half of the thirteenth century, before the pope restored the Louth area to the diocese of Armagh. The heavy price the reforming king Donnchad O’Carroll had exacted for his support of the archbishop is only one symptom of his political power at this time when, as we shall see, he also extended his rule over the areas of south county Armagh and south Down, with the consent of his overlord, Muirchertach MacLaughlin. At the same time, it demonstrates MacLaughlin’s lack of interest in Armagh as opposed to his home church of Derry.

T H E R E I G N O F T H E H I G H - K I N G M U I R C H E RTA C H M A C L A U G H L I N

Donnchad O’Carroll, as well as being possibly responsible for freeing the primatial see from the hereditary claims of Clann Sínaich, acted as kingmaker in Tír Eógain. Domnall Óc O’Gormley, the rebel sub-king of Cenél Múáin, in north-west Tír Eógain, had slain two over-kings of Ailech in succession, Magnus (London and New York, 1920), pp 43–57. 31 See his eulogistic obit in Lawlor, St Bernard of Clairvaux’s Life of St Malachy, p. 170. 32 Gwynn, The Irish church in the eleventh and

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MacLaughlin in 1129 and Conchobar MacLaughlin in 1136. In 1143, he led a rising that expelled the new king Muirchertach son of Niall MacLaughlin, at which point kingship over Tír Eógain was assumed by Domnall O’Gormley himself.33 However, with the help of Donnchad O’Carroll, king of Airgialla, and the Cenél Conaill, who had once been ruled by Muirchertach MacLaughlin’s father Niall, the exiled Muirchertach recovered his kingship in 1145, and with O’Carroll’s backing, he went on to receive submission and hostages from Ulaid and Tír Conaill in 1148, from MacMurrough (Mac Murchada), king of Leinster in 1149, and from the ageing Connacht high-king, Toirdelbach Mór O’Conor, in 1150.34 Muirchertach’s title as ‘high-king of Ireland with opposition’ could be said to date from this year. It became widely acknowledged after King Toirdelbach O’Conor died in 1156, and MacLaughlin went on a series of expeditions round Ireland collecting submission even from the Munster kings in 1157, a victory  almost certainly celebrated in the twelfth-century historical poem ‘A  Mhuirchertaigh mhic Néill náir’ (‘O Muirchertach son of noble Niall’), ostensibly in praise of the exploits of the tenth-century Muirchertach ‘of the Leather Cloaks’ (d.943), son of Níall Glúndub, but also a thinly disguised compliment to King Muirchertach son of Niall MacLaughlin.35 In 1157, the High-King Muirchertach, together with Donnchad O’Carroll, king of Airgialla, Tigernan O’Rourke, king of Breifne, and Cú-Ulad Mac Donleavy, king of Ulaid, attended the consecration of the church at Mellifont Abbey, county Louth, the first Irish foundation of the newly-imported Cistercian monks. Besides gifts of gold and cattle, King Muirchertach endowed the brethren with a townland on the Meath side of Drogheda. His gift implies not only that MacLaughlin was prepared to be a generous patron to the current movement for church reform, but also that he claimed ultimate ownership of all the lands of the Irish kings who submitted to him. This claim is baldly restated in the surviving text of our earliest Latin charter of an Irish king, MacLaughlin’s grant of lands from the territories of the kings of Uí Echach Ulad and Airthir to endow the Cistercian house of Newry, about 1156–7.36 Muirchertach begins it by describing himself as ‘king of all Ireland’ (rex totius Hiberniae), and ends with a clause that limits the right of the kings or chiefs of Airgialla or the Uí Echach of twelfth centuries, pp 212–13; Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Armagh and Louth in the twelfth century’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 1:1 (1954), 1–11. 33 AFM 2, pp 1030–1, 1052–3, 1060–1, 1068–71. 34 AFM 2, pp 1076–93. 35 Ó Corráin, ‘Muirchertach MacLochlainn and the Circuit of Ireland’. On the general validity or otherwise of the claims of both Domnall and Muirchertach MacLaughlin to the high-kingship, see P.C. Griffin, ‘The MacLochlainn high-kingship in late pre-Norman Ireland’ (M.Phil., TCD 2002), available on internet at http://evergreen. 27names.org/academia/MmL.pdf. 36 Marie Thérèse Flanagan, ‘The context and uses of the Latin charter in twelfth-century Ireland’ in Huw Pryce (ed.), Literacy in medieval Celtic societies (Cambridge, 1998), pp 113–32, at p. 113; eadem, Ir. Royal Charters, pp 291–305.

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Ulaid to grant further lands to the monks of Newry unless they have his permission, ‘that I may know what and how much of my earthly kingdom the king of Heaven may possess for the use of his poor monks’.37 The restriction was almost certainly because lands given to the church became exempt from royal taxation. This was an unusual clause to add to a charitable donation, and it perhaps should come as no surprise that in 1164–5, in the course of suppressing a revolt of the Ulaid, Muirchertach’s army ‘destroyed the monastery of the monks of Newry’38 that their leader had so recently and conditionally endowed. King Muirchertach’s role in the twelfth-century church reform movement continued to be idiosyncratic. The general thrust of the reform in Ireland was to replace the scattered jurisdiction of the ‘heirs’ of particular saints over their subject churches with the territorial rule of diocesan bishops, and to draw a sharp distinction between secular clergy and monks, the latter now to be recruited into the new Continental orders, such as the Cistercians and the Arrouaisian canons of St Augustine. King Muirchertach, however, actively promoted the revival of the old Columban familia, with the church of Derry as its new centre, replacing both the original mother-church of Iona, and the later pre-eminence of Kells among the Irish Columban foundations. His task was made easier by the fact that Archbishop Gelasius of Armagh had previously been the Columban abbot of Derry. In 1158, the Synod of Brí-mic-Thaidc, presided over by Gelasius, decreed that Flaithbertach Ó Brolcháin, the abbot of Derry, should be accorded the same status as a diocesan bishop, and that he should have authority over all Columban foundations throughout Ireland. In 1161, King Muirchertach himself came with his army to a mixed assembly of ‘the men of Ireland’, both laymen and clerics, at Áth na Dairbrige in Meath, where it was decreed that Columban churches in Meath and Leinster should be exempted in future from local authority, and instead come under the taxation and jurisdiction of the abbot of Derry. The Middle Irish Life of St Columba, which lays emphasis on Columba’s fondness for Derry, and his overlordship of churches in the midlands of Ireland, is considered by Herbert to have been composed in this period.39 Between 1162 and 1164, Abbot Flaithbertach and King Muirchertach demolished over eighty houses in the centre of Derry to make an extensive church precinct surrounded by a wall, and erected a great church inside, ninety feet in length. MacLaughlin’s motives for this patronage were exposed in 1164 as a concern to enhance the prestige of Derry, the church closest to his political homeland, rather than an altruistic devotion to the Columban familia in general. In that year, he prevented Abbot Ó Brolcháin from accepting an invitation from Somarled, lord of Argyll and the Hebrides, to cross over to Iona and restore the 37 Flanagan, Ir. royal charters p. 293. See Katharine Simms, ‘Medieval Armagh: the kingdom of Oirthir (Orior) and its rulers the Uí Annluain (O’Hanlons)’ in Armagh Hist. & Soc., pp 187– 216, at p. 189. 38 Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 44–5. 39 Herbert, Iona, Kells and Derry, pp 188–205.

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ancient mother-church there, which had claimed authority over both the Irish and Scottish foundations.40 (See Fig. 5) Although Muirchertach called himself ‘king of all Ireland’, throughout his reign he experienced constant opposition, not only from Ruaidri son of Toirdelbach Mór O’Conor, the new king of Connacht, but from the various Ulster territories themselves. It was not until 1160 that he finally defeated the rebellious King Domnall O’Gormley of Cenél Múáin, and subsequently had him assassinated, and an incident that took place during this final battle reawakened the old feud between the MacLaughlin dynasty and their O’Neill kinsmen.41 The Ulaid, under Cú-Ulad MacDonleavy and his son Eochaid, rebelled repeatedly and had to be forced back into submission.42 Eochaid MacDonleavy’s over-vaulting ambition is suggested by the historical poem composed in his honour, ‘Clann Ollaman Uaisle Emna’: Eochaid of Loch Cuan [Strangford Lough] … the affection of the Ulstermen for him is famous … the daring hero of the east of Ireland, the invader of Scotland and its territories: a noise like the onslaught(?) of crowded Doomsday – the storming of Dublin of the swords … The Ulstermen will arise with Eochaid to plunder the Irish and slay the foreigners: they all enjoy prosperity, the hosts of his people, the companies of their children.43 (See Plate III) King Donnchad O’Carroll of Airgialla was foster-father to Eochaid MacDonleavy and, in 1165, mediated a truce in which Muirchertach MacLaughlin agreed to restore Eochaid as king over the Ulaid, in return for numerous hostages and the ceding of the territory of Bairche (now the barony of Mourne, county Down), which MacLaughlin then bestowed on O’Carroll. The truce was secured by oaths on Armagh’s prime relic, the ‘Staff of Jesus’, and Derry’s ‘Gospel of Martin’, and was guaranteed by O’Carroll. Consequently, when MacLaughlin broke his word the following year and treacherously captured and blinded Eochaid MacDonleavy, Donnchad O’Carroll switched his allegiance to Ruaidri O’Conor of Connacht, and entered Tír Eógain with an avenging army. He was joined by the majority of the Cenél Eógain themselves, and Muirchertach MacLaughlin, heavily outnumbered, was killed and decapitated ‘for the [outraged] honour of Jesus, Patrick and Ó Cerbaill’. Thereafter O’Carroll proceeded to Mag Imcláir, the plain about Dungannon, and Áed O’Neill was inaugurated as the new king of Cenél Eógain.44 40 AU 2, pp 132–47; Herbert, Iona, Kells and Derry, pp 109–20. 41 AU 2, pp 136–7; see Katharine Simms, ‘Late medieval Tír Eoghain: the kingdom of the Great Ó Néill’ in Tyrone Hist. & Soc., pp 127–62, at pp 129–30. 42 AFM 2, pp 1082–7, 1120–1, 1154–5. 43 Byrne, ‘Clann Ollaman Uaisle Emna’, p. 80 – the expression ‘foreigners’ (Gaill) at this date habitually referred to those of Norse descent in Dublin and the Hebrides. 44 Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 44–7;

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M A C L A U G H L I N – O ’ N E I L L R I VA L RY

This Áed, the first O’Neill to hold the kingship of Tír Eógain for a century, was to be known to the genealogists as Áed ‘the Lazy-Rumped Lad’ (An Macáem Tóinlesc), a nickname earned, we are told, by his refusal as a boy to stand up respectfully in the presence of King Muirchertach MacLaughlin.45 He did not reign unopposed. In 1167, the new high-king, Ruaidri O’Conor, led a large army northwards and decreed that Tír Eógain should be divided in two, with the territory north of Slieve Gallion going to Niall son of Muirchertach MacLaughlin, and the southern part to Áed O’Neill. This policy of ‘divide and rule’ was much practised by the twelfth-century ‘high-kings with opposition’, though here, as on other occasions, the settlement did not prove a lasting one. The ‘half-king’ Niall, and his brothers and successors Conchobar and Máelsechlainn MacLaughlin, fought successfully to unseat Áed ‘the LazyRumped Lad’, and reunite Tír Eógain under their own dynasty. When the Annals of Ulster notice his death in 1177, they call O’Neill merely ‘king of Cenél Eógain for a time’. His short taste of power, however, paved the way for the long and successful reign of his son, Áed Méith O’Neill (‘Áed of Omeath’, king c.1196–1230) and, in 1241, his grandson Brian Rúad O’Neill (‘Brian the Redhaired’) came near to wiping out the MacLaughlin dynasty, and ended for ever their rival claims to kingship of Cenél Eógain.46 The period of MacLaughlin dominance over Ulster is poorly documented and has been understudied. The annals seem to record little but resistance to their authority, both inside and outside the northern province. One distinctive aspect of the family’s power was their firm grip on the Cenél Conaill, who had broken away from the earlier O’Neill over-kingship to make a separate treaty with the Munster high-king Brian Boru. The reign of the heir-apparent, Niall MacLaughlin, over the Cenél Conaill in 1113, while his father Domnall ruled the Cenél Eógain, was unprecedented. It was facilitated by the location of their dynastic homeland on the Inishowen peninsula, and it was presumably the threat that this geographical pincer movement posed to the separate identity, and perhaps the territorial integrity, of the border kingdom of Cenél Múáin, that provoked the sub-king Domnall O’Gormley into his constant revolts. The interest shown by Muirchertach MacLaughlin in restoring the Columban churches across Ireland should not be seen simply as conservatism. It was a symptom of his contrasting cultural context. With his power-base in Derry and Inishowen, Mac Laughlin looked northwards and eastwards from Ulster. While the involvement of Irish kings further south in the twelfth-century AU 2, pp 152–5; AFM 2, pp 1158–9 (AD1166). 45 Tadhg Ó Donnchadha (eag.), Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe (Dublin, 1931), p. 29; Ó Ceallaigh, Gleanings, p. 87; Simms, ‘Late medieval Tír Eoghain’, p. 129. 46 AU 2, pp 186–7; Simms, ‘Tír Eoghain “North of the Mountain”’, pp 153–4.

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church reform showed the effects of cultural influence from the kingdom of England and the Holy Roman Empire of the Germans,47 the overseas culture with which MacLaughlin interacted most closely would seem to have been Scotland and the Isles (including the Isle of Man), as is suggested by Somarled’s invitation to the abbot of Derry.48 Even on the Scottish mainland, where church reform was being promoted by King David I, the dispersed jurisdiction of the bishop associated with the Columban church of Dunkeld was not rationalized until the foundation of the diocese of Argyll c.1190.49 The northern location of the MacLaughlin homeland also served to distance Ulster under this dynasty’s rule from the mainstream of Irish politics. Geographical considerations made it virtually impossible for them to exercise any meaningful control over Munster, as confirmed by the unsatisfactory truce that ended Domnall MacLaughlin’s invasion of the O’Brien kingdom in 1114. Moreover, neither Domnall nor Muirchertach MacLaughlin succeeded in establishing a presence in the Viking sea-port of Dublin, which was becoming a central goal for all the other aspirants to high-kingship of Ireland. It is very telling that while jurists awarded the title of ‘a king of Ireland without opposition’ to the claimant who held the three harbours of Dublin, Limerick and Waterford, as did the O’Brien high-kings, an Ulster ‘high-king with opposition’ was described as merely ruling one single province, while being able to bring home his army safely from invasions of the other provinces. The expulsion of nascent Viking settlements in Ulster by Aed Findliath in the late ninth century may have been another factor contributing to Ulster’s growing isolation at this period. Though the annals might suggest the authority of the MacLaughlins over the rest of their own province was shaky, it may be a testimony to the importance of their supporting network of political alliances that we find a wholesale change of ruling families across so many regional kingships in Ulster after their fall. The Dorrian (Ó Máeldoraid) kings of Tír Conaill vanish from the political record after the twelfth century, rapidly followed by their rivals the O’Cannons (Uí Chanannáin),50 to be replaced by the O’Donnells (Uí Domnaill), from 1200 47 Donnchadh Ó Corráin, ‘Foreign connections and domestic politics: Killaloe and the Uí Briain in twelfth-century hagiography’ in Dorothy Whitelock et al. (eds), Ireland in early medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1982), pp 213–31; Denis Bethell, ‘English monks and Irish reform in the eleventh and twelfth centuries’ in T.D. Williams (eds), Historical Studies 8 (1971), pp 111–35; Dagmar Ó Riain-Raedel, ‘Irish kings and bishops in the memoria of the German Schottenklöster’ in Proinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter (eds), Irland und Europa: Die Kirche im Frühmittelalter/Ireland and Europe: the early church (Stuttgart, 1984), pp 390–404; Flanagan, Irish society, pp 7–55. 48 Above, pp 79–80. Seán Duffy, ‘Irishmen and Islesmen in the kingdoms of Dublin and Man, 1052–1171’, Ériu, 43 (1992), 93–134: 123–8. 49 G.W.S. Barrow, Kingship and unity: Scotland, 1000–1306 (rev. ed., Edinburgh, 1989), pp 66–8; A.D.M. Barrell, Medieval Scotland (Cambridge, 2000), pp 44–5. 50 See T.G. Cannon, ‘History of the O’Cannons of Tír Chonaill’, Donegal Annual, 12 (1978), 276–315.

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onwards. The O’Hegny (Ó hÉignig) dynasty in Fermanagh had given way to the Maguires (Méig Uidir) by the mid-thirteenth century, the O’Carrolls (Uí Cherbaill) were replaced by MacMahons (Meic Mathgamna) in Airgialla (or Monaghan), and the O’Rogans (Uí Ruadacáin) by O’Hanlons (Uí Annluain) in Airthir (county Armagh).51 However, another possible explanation for the simultaneous collapse of so many allied northern dynasties, apart from the fall of the MacLaughlin overkingship and the rise of O’Neill, lies in the arrival of English colonists. The invasion and conquest of eastern Ulster by John de Courcy in 1177 was only the beginning. De Courcy’s lordship, or principality, was followed in 1205 by the creation of an enduring earldom of Ulster, with claims to province-wide authority.

51 Katharine Simms, ‘The medieval kingdom of Lough Erne’, Clogher Record, 9:2 (1977), 126–41: 129–30; eadem, ‘Medieval Fermanagh’ in Fermanagh Hist. & Soc., pp 77–103, pp 84–5; eadem, ‘Medieval Armagh: the kingdom of Oirthir’, pp 188–9.

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CHAPTER

3

The Ulster earldom to the late thirteenth century: co-existence and Anglicization

T H E C O N Q U E S T O F T H E U L A I D B Y J O H N D E C O U RC Y

At first sight, the conquest of Ulster by the Anglo-Normans, and its inclusion in the English king’s lordship of Ireland, brought the province back into more immediate contact with the rest of the island and with the wider European world. Monasteries were founded in eastern Ulster as daughter-houses of English, Scottish and even French communities. The Gaelic chieftains were summoned to send their armies to take part in the English king’s campaigns in Scotland, Wales and Gascony, and it appears that on occasion they responded to the summons. On the other hand, the earldom of Ulster, and still more the lordship of John de Courcy that preceded it, was endowed with considerable autonomy. Royal records of events taking place in Ulster, or of its financial or administrative affairs, were only created when an earl was deposed, or underage, and responsibility for the area passed into the hands of royal officials. When the holder of the lordship or earldom was an adult male, he administered his own chancery and treasury, dispensed justice and collected taxation not only from the Ulster colonists, but from the Irish chieftains there, almost as an independent prince.1 The first Cambro-Norman adventurers came to Ireland in 1167–71 as auxiliaries, contracted to assist the deposed king of Leinster, Diarmait MacMurrough (d.1171), to win back his throne. Their rapid success culminated in a royal expedition by Henry II of England in 1171–2. Henry received submissions from the southern Irish kings, and made lasting arrangements for his new lordship of Ireland to be administered by a justiciar and council at Dublin. Even Murchad O’Carroll, king of Airgialla, son and successor of Donnchad O’Carroll (d.1168), and Donnsléibe MacDonleavy, king of Ulaid, are said to have travelled to Dublin to meet and submit to Henry.2 However, the Connacht high-king, Ruaidri O’Conor, as well as the Northern Uí Néill kings 1 J.F. Lydon, ‘John de Courcy (c.1150–1219) and the medieval frontier’ in Ciarán Brady (ed.), Worsted in the game: losers in Irish history (Dublin, 1989), pp 37–46; T.E. McNeill, AngloNorman Ulster: the history and archaeology of an Irish barony, 1177–1400 (Edinburgh, 1980), pp 62–78, 98–117; Daniel Brown, Hugh de Lacy, first earl of Ulster: rising and falling in Angevin Ireland (Woodbridge, 2016), pp 54–8. 2 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 49–52, 144–5, 148;

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(of Cenél Conaill and Cenél Eógain), remained aloof.3 In 1174, O’Conor led a major hosting into Meath to burn the new castle of Trim built by Hugh de Lacy, who had been created lord of Meath. According to the later Norman-French verse narrative commonly known as ‘The song of Dermot and the earl’, the high-king’s forces on that occasion included several major Ulster rulers: Ó Máeldoraid (Dorrian), king of Cenél Conaill, MacDonleavy, king of Ulaid (Ruaidri MacDonleavy, brother of the late king Donnsléibe who had died in 1173), O’Carroll of Airgialla, and O’Neill of Tír Eógain (Áed ‘the Lazy-Rumped Lad’), who brought with him a force of 3,000 men.4 However, Irish hit-and-run methods of warfare could not turn back the tide of conquest. The castle of Trim was rebuilt and, in 1175, Ruaidri O’Conor assented to the Treaty of Windsor, which transferred direct rule of Leinster, Meath and the main seaports to Henry II, and made the rest of Ireland tributary to the English crown, the tribute to be collected from the other Irish kings by Ruaidri O’Conor as their overlord.5 Then in 1177, arguably with the approval of King Henry, the adventurous knight Sir John de Courcy and his followers undertook a freelance expedition into Ulaid that immediately captured the MacDonleavy centre at Downpatrick.6 Cardinal Vivian, papal legate to Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man, was in Downpatrick on church business at the time, and vainly tried to persuade de Courcy to withdraw in return for the payment of tribute. When his mediation failed, according to the English chronicler William of Newburgh, the Cardinal urged the Irish of Ulaid to fight for their homeland and blessed their troops before their unsuccessful counter-attack.7 Interestingly, in view of the earlier struggles of the Ulaid kings to remain independent, Ruaidri MacDonleavy in this crisis appealed for support to his Cenél Eógain overlord, Máelsechlainn MacLaughlin. MacLaughlin duly arrived to confront de Courcy in July of the same year, surrounded by his chief nobles and reinforced by an impressive array of church relics, borne into battle by their hereditary keepers. The defeat inflicted by de Courcy’s Anglo-Norman knights on this occasion was devastating, involving the slaughter of many sub-chieftains of Tír Eógain and Ulaid, and the abandonment of the relics themselves on the battlefield.8 Perhaps prompted by this visible demonstration of the close ties between church and politics in the land he was conquering, de Courcy went out of his way to woo the approval of the Ulaid churchmen. According to Gerald of Wales, chief chronicler of the events of the invasion, John de Courcy constantly kept AFM 2, pp 1172–3; Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 56–7. 3 Scott & Martin, Expugnatio, pp 94–7, 312, notes 157–8; Flanagan, Irish society, pp 310–11. 4 Mullally, Deeds of the Normans, p. 136; Orpen, Song of Dermot, pp 234–41. 5 Flanagan, Irish society, pp 227–72, 312–13. 6 Seán Duffy, ‘The first Ulster plantation: John de Courcy and the men of Cumbria’ in Terry Barry, Robin Frame and Katharine Simms (eds), Colony and frontier in medieval Ireland (London and Rio Grande, 1995), pp 1–27, at p. 3; Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 58–9, 62. 7 M.T. Flanagan, ‘Hiberno-papal relations in the late twelfth century’, Archivium Hibernicum, 34 (1976/7), 55–70: 59. 8 Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 64–7; Scott & Martin, Expugnatio, pp 178–9.

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with him a book written in Irish, containing alleged prophecies of St Columba, including one that a needy stranger from afar would take Downpatrick with a small force.9 One result of de Courcy’s having limited numbers of his own followers was that he relied on the church as an important colonizing agency. With the consent of the bishop, Malachy III, he brought in no less than six new monastic communities to the diocese of Down. They were all daughter-houses of English or Scottish foundations, but some were installed on the sites of extinct early Irish monasteries, such as Nendrum and Inch Abbey.10 (See Fig. 5) Around 1186, de Courcy sponsored the translation (the transfer) of the alleged relics of all three patron saints of Ireland, Patrick, Brigit and Columba, from the single grave in Downpatrick where they were ‘discovered’, to a shrine in the cathedral. At the same time he commissioned the clerical scholar, Jocelin of Furness, to write a new Latin Life of St Patrick, and struck coins at Downpatrick with his name on one side and that of Patrick on the other.11 His policy was strikingly similar to that of Muirchertach MacLaughlin in relation to Derry, in that he enhanced a local cult in a church that was fully under his control, to counterbalance the prestige of Armagh, which was less easy to influence. Similar motives prompted the justiciar, William fitz Audelm, to move the relic alleged to be St Patrick’s crozier, the Bachall Ísa, ‘the Staff of Jesus’, from Armagh to Dublin, perhaps as a preliminary move in what became a long but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to make Dublin, rather than Armagh, the primatial see for all Ireland.12 De Courcy resembled a MacLaughlin king in other aspects of his rule, notably his connections with north Britain and the Isle of Man. In 1154, during his struggle against the outgoing high-king, Toirdelbach Mór O’Conor, Muirchertach MacLaughlin had hired a fleet of mercenaries drawn from Galloway, the Western Isles of the Hebrides and the Isle of Man. Subsequently, about 1173 or earlier, a son of Muirchertach MacLaughlin gave his daughter Finnguala in marriage to Gofraid, king of the Isle of Man. John de Courcy, who had pre-existing Scottish connections, by 1180 had wedded Affrica, daughter of the same Gofraid, king of Man.13 (See Fig. 7) 9  Scott & Martin, Expugnatio, pp 176–7, 333–4 note 309. 10 M.T. Flanagan, ‘John de Courcy, the first Ulster plantation and Irish church men’ in Brendan Smith (ed.), Britain and Ireland, 900–1300 (Cambridge, 1999), pp 154–78, at p. 156; McNeill, Anglo-Norman Ulster, pp 13–14. 11 Scott & Martin, Expugnatio, pp 234–5, 353 note 479; O’Meara, Gerald of Wales, p. 105; Robin Frame, Colonial Ireland, 1169–1369 (Dublin, 1981), p. 27; Michael Dolley, Medieval Anglo-Irish coins (London and Belfast, 1972), pp 4–5. See Joseph Szövérffy, ‘The Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland and St Patrick: Dublin and Armagh in Jocelin’s Life of St Patrick’, Repertorium Novum, 2 (1957–60), 6–16. 12 Scott & Martin, Expugnatio, pp 182–3, 336 note 328; M.P. Sheehy, Pontificia Hibernia: medieval papal chancery documents concerning Ireland, 640–1261 (2 vols, Dublin, 1962–5), 1, p. 235 note 1; ibid., 2, pp 240 note 1, 285, 294–5 note 1; J.A. Watt, ‘The church and the two nations in late medieval Armagh’ in W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), The churches, Ireland and the Irish, Studies in Church History 25 (Oxford, 1989), pp 37–54, at pp 50, 109–12. 13  Duffy, ‘The first Ulster

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The Ulster earldom to the late thirteenth century Godfrey Crovan Kg of the Isles, Kg of Dublin (d.1096) Olaf Bitling, ‘the Red’ Kg of the Isles (d.1153)

Ragnhild m. Somerled (d.1164)

Godfrey Kg of the Isles, Kg of Dublin (d.1187)

Dugald Ranald (d.1229) Kg of the Isles

Godfrey Donn Kg of the Isles (d.c.1231)

Affrica m. John de Courcy

dau. m. Thomas of Galloway

Olaf Dubh Kg of the Isles (d.1237)

dau. m. Llywelyn Prince of Gwynedd

Ranald

Angus

(The MacDonalds of the Isles)

Harald (d.1248) Kg of Man and the Isles m. Cecilia dau. of Hakon Kg. of Norway

Fig. 7 Genealogical background of John de Courcy’s wife. Note connections with Somerled, ancestor of the MacDonalds, MacDougalls and MacRorys, and with Thomas of Galloway, a future landowner in Ulster. Based on Sellar, ‘Hebridean sea kings’ in Cowan and MacDonald (eds), Alba, p. 192. Kings in boldface.

Soon de Courcy found it necessary to extend his raids into Cenél Eógain itself. Already in 1177, he launched an expedition northwards from Downpatrick into the Antrim area. There he attacked the sub-kingdom of Dál Araide, where he slew the Cruthin dynast, Domnall mac mic Cathasaig (McCassey), but also attacked both Dál Ríata to the east of the Lower Bann, and Fir Lí on the west bank, territories now ruled by the Uí Thuirtre chief, Cú Mide Ó Floinn (O’Flynn/O’Lynn), a subject of Máelsechlainn MacLaughlin. On a second expedition against Dál Araide and Uí Thuirtre in 1178, de Courcy was severely defeated by O’Flynn, and barely escaped with his life. Indeed, earlier that year, de Courcy’s forces had been ambushed and defeated in the Cooley peninsula by Murchad O’Carroll of Airgialla, in alliance with Ruaidri MacDonleavy, so that the Annals of Tigernach announced optimistically: ‘The Foreigners who dwelt in Downpatrick were exterminated by the Cenél Eógain and by the Ulaid and the men of [Airgialla], through the miracles of SS Patrick, Columb cille and Brénann’.14 Their rejoicing was premature. The reverse merely taught de Courcy that if he was to control the Ulaid he must also subdue their supporters in Tír Eógain. The Cenél Eógain themselves were locked in a series of internal dynastic plantation’, pp 24–6. 14 AU 2, pp 185–9, 192–3; AFM 3, pp 38–43; Ann. Tig., p. 449 [303]; Scott & Martin, Expugnatio, pp 178–9.

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conflicts, including a succession struggle inside the MacLaughlin family itself, and this gave de Courcy the opportunity to regroup and take the offensive. After some years of being attacked by prospective overlords from both east and west, both Anglo-Normans and Cenél Eógain, the Irish of Ulaid hesitantly accepted de Courcy’s rule. There are no further confrontations recorded between de Courcy and the Ulaid from 1183 onwards.15 In 1196, Ruaidri MacDonleavy invaded the Armagh area with a troop of Anglo-Normans, and some Connacht princes (he had a marriage connection with the high-king Ruaidri O’Conor),16 but was crushingly defeated by the Cenél Eógain of Telach Óc and the local Airthir forces.17 Since the Cenél Eógain of Telach Óc were the dynastic group most closely associated with the O’Neill line, they may have been led to battle on this occasion by Áed Méith O’Neill, son and successor of the former king, Áed ‘the Lazy-Rumped Lad’ O’Neill (d.1177). In contrast to the brief career of his father, Áed Méith O’Neill was to have a long and victorious reign as king of Tír Eógain, until his death in 1230, by which time the annals described him as king of the whole northern province. Passing comments by the chroniclers suggest that Áed Méith’s success was due to his personal talents as a military strategist and politician, attacking the enemy in the rear, anticipating hostile combinations, negotiating cannily, even with King John of England. He had, however, an uphill struggle to establish himself. De Courcy’s policy at this time was to support various dethroned princes of the MacLaughlin dynasty, bringing them with him on invasions of the north of Tír Eógain, presumably in the hope of installing them as puppet kings under his authority.18 In 1197, he launched a series of attacks on the north coast of the present county Derry, motivated, according to the chronicler Roger Howden, by a desire to avenge the death of his brother Jordan de Courcy, slain by an Irishman of his household. These incursions were resisted by two successive kings of Cenél Conaill (the Donegal branch of the Northern Uí Néill), the long-established Flaithbertach Ó Máeldoraid (Dorrian), who won a victory, but died shortly afterwards, and his successor, Echmarcach Ó Dochartaig (O’Doherty), who was defeated and killed by de Courcy’s men. De Courcy’s ally in this victory was the Scottish noble Duncan son of Gilbert, lord of Carrick and Wigtonshire, who, like de Courcy himself, was connected by marriage to the kings of Man. De Courcy is said to have rewarded him with a grant of land along the newly-conquered northern coast of Ulster, at the same time reinforcing the Bann frontier with a castle at Mount Sandel, two miles 15  McNeill, Anglo-Norman Ulster, p. 6. 16  ALC 1, pp 290–3. 17  Simms, ‘Medieval Armagh: the kingdom of Oirthir’, p. 190; Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 76–7; ALC 1, pp 192–7; AU 2, pp 222–3 (AD1196); AFM 3, pp 102–5. 18 AU 2, pp 214–15, 224–7, 240–1 (AD1189, 1197, 1204). 19 Duffy, ‘The first Ulster plantation’, p. 24; McNeill, Anglo-Norman Ulster, p. 14; AU 2, pp 224–9; Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., p. 74.

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south of Coleraine.19 However, in 1199, another of de Courcy’s westward raids was countered by Áed Méith O’Neill, who unexpectedly brought a fleet of five ships to attack and burn the English settlement at Larne, causing de Courcy to return hurriedly from his invasion of Tír Eógain. The following year, De Courcy made three raids into Tír Eógain, the last directed at O’Neill’s home base of Mag Imcláir, around the present Dungannon, but was there defeated and routed by O’Neill.20 Thereafter the young Irish king and the ageing Anglo-Norman baron seemed to have arrived at some kind of truce. In 1201, both led expeditions into Connacht to support King Cathal Crobderg O’Conor against a rival kinsman, but since the two Ulster leaders went separately, it appears that O’Neill was not simply acting as a subject ally of de Courcy. O’Neill’s absence from Tír Eógain may account for his temporary deposition in 1201 by the short-lived Conchobar Becc (‘C. the small’, or ‘the most junior’) MacLaughlin, but the annals do not mention English involvement this time, and although the English of Ulster made one more expedition in favour of Diarmait son of Muirchertach MacLaughlin in 1204, it is not clear that de Courcy was still in charge by that date.

T H E C R E AT I O N O F T H E E A R L D O M O F U L S T E R U N D E R H U G H D E L AC Y T H E YO U N G E R

Hugh de Lacy the younger, a son of Hugh de Lacy the first Anglo-Norman lord of Meath, had become lord of half county Louth through his marriage to the heiress Lescelina de Verdon c.1195.21 He had joined de Courcy’s unsuccessful king-making expedition to Connacht in 1201, but on the return of the defeated army had changed sides, taking de Courcy temporarily captive, and threatening to hand him over to King John. Relations between King John and de Courcy had been bad since 1194–5 when de Courcy, as justiciar of Ireland, sided with King Richard the Lionheart during the rebellion of John, who was then lord of Ireland.22 Now, de Courcy’s Connacht adventure gave King John a pretext to bring about his downfall. With the king’s sanction, Hugh de Lacy the younger raided Ulaid in 1203 and again in 1204, defeating de Courcy, who fled to take refuge with the Cenél Eógain, though whether his protectors were his MacLaughlin allies, or a newly mollified Áed O’Neill, is not made clear in the annals. Finally, de Courcy was captured by de Lacy and forced to convey his lands over to his captor in return for his release. Then on 29 May 1205, King John made a formal grant of all de Courcy’s land in Ulster to Hugh de Lacy, with the title of earl, and wide powers of jurisdiction, including even 20 AU 2, pp 224–33. 21 Brendan Smith, Colonisation and conquest in medieval Ireland: the English in Louth, 1170–1330 (Cambridge, 1999), pp 41, 45, 49; Brown, Hugh de Lacy, first earl of Ulster, pp 18–19. 22 NHI 9, p. 470; Steve Flanders, De Courcy: Anglo-Normans in Ireland, England and France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Dublin, 2008), p. 162.

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Fig. 8 The medieval administrative divisions of the earldom of Ulster (demarcated with dotted lines, modern counties with solid lines). From A.J. Otway-Ruthven, A history of medieval Ireland, end map.

administration of the ‘crosslands’ (church lands), subject to royal supervision.23 (See Fig. 8) THE REIGN OF ÁED MÉITH O’NEILL

The long reign of Áed Méith O’Neill in Tír Eogain exercised an important stabilizing influence right across the Ulster province. A skilled and enterprising military commander, he not only brought de Courcy’s westward expansion to a halt in 1199–1200, but at the same time reinstated the former supremacy of the Cenél Eógain kings over Tír Conaill and Airgialla.24 The Annals of Connacht when recording Áed Méith O’Neill’s death under the year 1230, term him ‘king of Conchobar’s Province’, using the honorific title formerly claimed by the kings of Ulaid who believed they were descended from heroes of the legendary King Conchobar mac Nessa’s court.25 This could imply that Áed’s authority was also recognized by the Irish of Ulaid,26 an overlordship that would have required the sanction of Earl Hugh de Lacy. 23 For the course of this war, and the motivations behind King John’s creation of the earldom, see Brown, Hugh de Lacy, first earl of Ulster, pp 26–49. See also Orpen, Normans, 2, pp 134– 44 [204–8]; Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 73–5. 24 Simms, ‘Late medieval Tír Eoghain’, pp 132–5. 25 Above, pp 36, 41, 66–7. 26 See Katharine Simms, ‘The dating of two poems

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Fig. 9 Castle of Carrickfergus. Roger Stalley collection © TRIARC Trinity Irish Art Research Centre.

Such an arrangement could well have developed. As in the case of de Courcy, although O’Neill and Earl Hugh de Lacy began as enemies, they were to end as allies. In 1207, de Lacy brought an army from Meath and Leinster to lay waste the districts of Ciannachta (the barony of Keenaght, county Derry) and Telach Óc (Tullyhogue) in O’Neill’s kingdom of Tír Eógain. The annalist commented ‘they took not pledges or hostages of Áedh Ua Neill on that occasion’,27 which possibly contains a hint that de Lacy had greater success another time. Although we know from the annals that the two leaders ended as allies from these hostile beginnings, we do not know when or how this change occurred. In 1210, Earl Hugh and his elder brother, Lord Walter de Lacy of Meath, fell out of royal favour. King John brought an army, reinforced by the Irish and Anglo-Norman magnates of southern Ireland, to besiege de Lacy’s castle of Carrickfergus (see Fig. 9). Áed O’Neill came to Carrickfergus to meet the English king and negotiate, but is said to have stipulated that two or three English nobles should be kept by his men as hostages for his safe return. When talks broke down, he decamped before King John could attack his troops. He is reported as saying on this occasion: ‘Depart, O foreigners, I will give you no hostages at all this time’.28 on Ulster chieftains’ in A.P. Smyth (ed.), Seanchas, pp 381–6, at pp 383–4 for a literary source that may support this hypothesis. 27 AU 2, pp 246–9. 28 AI, pp 338–9; AFM 3, pp 162– 5, Ann. Clonm., p. 223; Seán Duffy, ‘King John’s expedition to Ireland AD1210: the evidence reconsidered’, IHS, 30 (1996), 1–24. On motives behind King John’s war against de Lacy see

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King John nonetheless captured Carrickfergus, banished Hugh de Lacy and took the earldom of Ulster into his own hands. This period of direct royal rule lasted until de Lacy’s reinstatement in 1227, and has resulted in much more information about the Anglo-Norman settlement in Ulster finding its way into government records, the most valuable of all being the text of a ‘pipe roll’ containing accounts of the king’s sheriffs in Ireland for the years 1211–12.29 From these sources and the archaeological evidence, McNeill has concluded that at this early period in the colony’s history, the Anglo-Norman estates were clustered in the area of the diocese of Down, the former kingdom of the MacDonleavy kings of Dál Fíatach. The northern two-thirds of county Antrim (the present diocese of Connor), and the Mourne mountains in the interior of county Down (diocese of Dromore), still remained largely in Irish hands, controlled by frontier castles, probably of the motte and bailey type, located at Antrim, Dromore and Mag Coba (Ballyroney, county Down). There were already stone-built fortresses at Carrickfergus and Dundrum, and the earldom was divided for administration into five bailiwicks, known as Antrim, Carrickfergus, Ards, Blathewic (Newtownards) and Lecale (containing Downpatrick).30 (see Fig. 8) The northern coast from Larne to Derry, including the territories of Dál Ríata, Cíannacht and Telach Óc, and ‘that part of the settlement of Derry-Columbkill which belonged to O’Neill’, was granted away by the affronted King John in 1212 to de Courcy’s old ally Duncan, lord of Carrick, and his nephew, Alan fitz Roland, a grant that was passed on to the latter’s brother Thomas fitz Roland of Galloway, earl of Athol, in 1213.31 This grant was merely a ‘licence to conquer’, but Earl Thomas lost no time in acting on it. According to the annals, he joined forces with the sons of the Hebridean chief, Ranald or Ragnall son of Somarled (see above, Fig. 7), and came with a fleet of seventy-six or seventy-seven ships to plunder the settlement of Derry and the peninsula of Inishowen in 1212 and 1214, and in the latter year joined the English of Ulster in demolishing the old ecclesiastical settlement of Coleraine (apart from the church itself) to build a new castle there.32 At the same time, the justiciar, Bishop John de Grey of Norwich, launched a full-scale attempt to conquer central Ulster by the land route. Castles were built at Belleek, Clones and ‘Áth Cruithne’ (probably a ford near Newry) to serve as bases for the attack. Áed O’Neill, together with the forces of Cenél Conaill and Airgialla, destroyed them all and launched counter-attacks on Carlingford in 1213, and Ulster east of the Bann in 1214. However, the ‘pipe roll of 14 John’ indicates the Brown, Hugh de Lacy, first earl of Ulster, pp 88–113. 29 Oliver Davies and D.B. Quinn (eds), ‘The Irish Pipe roll of 14 John’, UJA, 3rd ser., 4 (1941), supplement. 30 McNeill, AngloNorman Ulster, pp 6–18. 31 CDI 1, nos. 427, 468, 474, 564. See Simms, ‘Tír Eoghain “North of the Mountain”’, pp 154–5, 170 note 31. 32 AU 2, pp 252–3, 256–7 (AD1212, 1214); ALC, pp 246–51; Brown, Hugh de Lacy, first earl of Ulster, pp 139–40.

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English campaign had some effect. It records 321 cows received as rent from O’Neill for his territory, and a further 293 cows in part payment of a fine for rebelling against the English king’s authority.33 In return the English accepted O’Neill as a vassal king. A letter in the name of the child-king Henry III, announcing the dismissal of the justiciar Geoffrey de Marisco in 1221 and asking for compliance with the authority of his successor, was addressed to the greatest Irish and Anglo-Norman magnates of the day, including O’Neill ‘king of Cenél Eógain’.34 There were no other Gaelic chiefs from Ulster named. The only other Ulster nobles listed as recipients of this letter were Thomas of Galloway, earl of Athol, and Robert de Mandeville, Walter de Logan and John de Chester, tenants of the earldom of Ulster. This may be another indication that O’Neill was seen as dominating the rest of the Irish of Ulster, including the Ulaid. In 1223, the dispossessed Hugh de Lacy, tired of negotiating for the return of his lands, entered Ireland to claim them by force, and joined O’Neill in demolishing the earl of Athol’s castle at Coleraine.35 Together Áed Méith and Earl Hugh posted their Irish and English troops so strongly across the Fews mountains of south Armagh in 1224, that the justiciar’s army was blocked and peace negotiations were commenced.36 De Lacy recovered his earldom in 1227, and O’Neill suffered no further invasions of his territory before his death in 1230. Áed Méith O’Neill was just one of a group of remarkably long-lived Irish kings who reigned simultaneously in the first third of the thirteenth century, the second generation after the Anglo-Norman conquest. Two others were Cathal Crobderg O’Conor (kg 1196–1224), king of Connacht, and Donnchad Cairbrech O’Brien (kg 1210–43), king of Thomond or north Munster. By a mixture of armed resistance and limited cooperation with the English kings, they slowed down the pace of conquest and colonization, keeping their own jurisdictions intact. This had significant consequences, because the eleventh and twelfth centuries had been a time of fine weather, good harvests and population expansion in Europe generally, leading to high prices for agricultural produce and land hunger, the background against which not only the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland took place, but the establishment of the Crusader kingdoms in the Middle East and the German colonization of Slavic lands to the east of the Elbe.37 This general population growth was slowing by the later thirteenth 33 Davies and Quinn, ‘The Irish pipe roll of 14 John’, pp 36, 66; Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 88–91; Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 82–3. 34 CDI 1, no. 1001. 35 For a full account of Earl Hugh de Lacy, including his adventures in exile, see Brown, Hugh de Lacy, first earl of Ulster; also Colin Veach, Lordship in four realms: the Lacy family, 1166–1241 (Manchester, 2014). 36 AU 2, pp 270–1 (AD1222); ALC 1, pp 270–3; Ann. Conn., pp 6–7; Brown, Hugh de Lacy, first earl of Ulster, pp 4, 148–59. Above, p. 40. See Robin Frame, Ireland and Britain, 1170– 1450 (London and Rio Grande, OH, 1998), pp 158–62. 37  Robert Bartlett, ‘Colonial aristocracies of the high Middle Ages’ in Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (eds), Medieval

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century, so that although the barons renewed their drive westwards into the kingdoms of Connacht, Tír Eógain and Thomond after the death of these longlived kings, and succeeded in acquiring title to extensive lands and tribute, there was much less in the way of settlement by English peasants and burgesses in the west of Ireland in the later thirteenth century. Consequently it was easier for many Gaelic chiefs in the west and north to recover their independence in the course of the fourteenth century from the barons and knights who claimed authority over them, unsupported by a substantial body of colonists. Aside from this general pattern of slowing the pace of conquest, the long and successful reign of Áed Méith O’Neill had particular consequences for Ulster history, in that he decisively renewed the claim of the O’Neills rather than the MacLaughlins not only to rule Tír Eógain, but to aspire to province-wide dominance, laying the groundwork for his nephew Brian O’Neill’s daring ambition to revive the high-kingship of all Ireland.

M A C L A U G H L I N R E V I VA L

After Áed’s death, a succession struggle broke out between Domnall the son of Áed Méith O’Neill, and a certain Domnall MacLaughlin, stimulating Tír Eógain’s neighbours east and west to take advantage of its weakness. The kings of Tír Conaill, including the new O’Donnell (Ó Domnaill) dynasty that had risen to power in 1200, had repeatedly invaded Inishowen after the decline of the MacLaughlin kings. In the long term they were to be successful. In the fourteenth century Inishowen became a Cenél Conaill lordship under O’Donnell’s sub-chief O’Doherty, whose dynasty had expanded northwards and eastwards from a base as lords of Ardmire, around Raphoe. For this reason the peninsula of Inishowen was reckoned part of the O’Donnell lordship thereafter, and hence a part of the later county Donegal, though it had not been originally part of the historic Tír Conaill. However, Áed Méith, the Four Masters say, prevented Domnall Mór O’Donnell’s attempted expansion in 1208, and concluded an alliance with him against their common enemies, English and Irish.38 O’Donnell’s court poet Gilla Brígte Mac Con Mide (MacNamee) makes it rather clear that this alliance had involved Domnall Mór’s submission to Áed Méith O’Neill, when he claims the right to alternation in the kingship of the Northern Uí Néill, between the rulers of Cenél Conaill and Cenél Eógain. His message seems to be, now that Áed Méith is dead, it is time for O’Donnell to become overlord of Tír Eógain, as well as his own homeland, considering the youth and inexperience of the new O’Neill: frontier societies (Oxford, 1989), pp 23–47, at pp 23–4, 44–7; Georges Duby, The early growth of the European economy: warriors and peasants from the seventh to the twelfth century, trans. H.B. Clarke (Ithaca, 1978). 38 AFM 3, pp 158–9. 39 Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde,

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A king of the blood of Conall ruling over the Sons of Eoghan by virtue of his nobility, would be a wise notion … he it is who was chosen rather than a younger king; it is he whose prowess has been most tried.39 The poet prefaces his remarks by pointing out that the Southern Uí Néill dynasties have been rendered powerless by the presence of the Anglo-Normans in Meath and the loss of the immemorial royal site of Tara itself, and thus the leader of the Northern Uí Néill is the only remaining candidate for the highkingship of Ireland. Brian Boru, he argues, formed the only exception to the historic Uí Néill monopoly, mere military superiority exercised by the O’Conor kings of Connacht did not give them a legitimate claim to collect Ireland’s tribute.40 In later years this ranting about a patron’s claims to the high-kingship would become a commonplace compliment in poetic eulogies, but in midthirteenth-century Ulster there were still kings who saw the restoration of the high-kingship as a real possibility, as events were to show. O’Donnell’s designs on both Inishowen and the overlordship of Tír Eógain gave the earl of Ulster and Domnall MacLaughlin a common enemy. In 1232 MacLaughlin invaded Tír Conaill (Donegal) using English troops, thus presumably acting as de Lacy’s acknowledged vassal.41 However in 1234 or 1235 MacLaughlin became sole ruler of Tír Eógain by killing his rival Domnall O’Neill. Subsequently he overreached himself by supporting a general uprising of the Irish of Ulaid against the earl in 1238. With the help of the justiciar, Maurice Fitzgerald, de Lacy soon recovered control, and then banished MacLaughlin to Connacht, replacing him as king of Cenél Eógain with a candidate the annals call ‘the son of O’Neill’, or ‘O’Neill the Red’. Mention of his hair colour suggests this may be our first record of the future king Brian Rúad (‘the Red-haired’) son of Niall Rúad, and nephew to the late Áed Méith O’Neill.42 (See Fig. 10) Domnall MacLaughlin returned in 1239, defeated his rival in the Battle of Carnteel, and took back the kingship, with no interference from the now elderly Hugh de Lacy, or from Domnall Mór O’Donnell. However when Domnall Mór died in 1241 his son, the newly-inaugurated Máelsechlainn O’Donnell, joined forces with Brian Rúad O’Neill to defeat and kill Domnall MacLaughlin at the no. 1, verses 15, 21. 40  Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, no. 1, verses 5, 12–14. The reference to the O’Conor high-kingship could be seen as a reply to the poem ‘Tairnic an selsa ag Síl Néill’ (Brian Ó Cuív, ‘A poem composed for Cathal Croibhdhearg Ó Conchobhair’, Ériu, 34 (1983), 161–71), which claimed that four O’Conors had succeeded one another as high-kings of Ireland, including Conchobar Maenmaige and Cathal Crobderg, apparently basing this claim on the terms of the ineffective Treaty of Windsor (AD1175) – see above, p. 85. 41 AU 2, pp 286–9, AFM 3, pp 264–7. 42 Ann. Conn., pp 68–71, Ann. Clonm., p. 236; see ALC 1, pp 256–7 and genealogy in NLI MS G 2, f. 9v.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages Ancestors of the Great O’Neills of Tír Eógain

Ancestors of Clandeboy O’Neills

Áed an Macáem Tóinlesc (‘the Lazy-rumped Lad’) Kg of Tír Eógain (dep. c.1176, d.1177) Áed Méith Kg of Tír Eógain (d.1230)

Niall Ruad (d. c.1223)

Domnall Kg of Tír Eógain (d.c.1234)

Brian I Catha an Dúin, ‘of the Battle of Down’ Kg of Tír Eógain (d.1260)

Áed Buide I ‘the yellow-haired’ Kg of Tír Eógain (d.1283)

Niall Cúlánach ‘the long-haired’ Kg of Tír Eógain (d.1286)

Brian II Kg of Tír Eógain (d.1296)

Áed Remor, ‘the Fat’ Kg of the Irish of Ulster (d.1364)

Henry Kg of Ulster (d.1347)

Brian Chief of Clandeboy (d.1369)

Domnall Kg of the Irish of Ulster (d.1325)

Muirchertach Chief of Clandeboy (d.1395)

Brian Ballach ‘the Freckled’ Chief of Clandeboy (d.1425)

Áed Buide II Tánaiste of Clandeboy (d.1444)

Muirchertach Ruad ‘the Red’ Chief of Clandeboy (fl.c.1427–75)

Conn Lord of Trian Congail (d.1482)

Niall Mór ‘the Elder’ Prince of the Irish of Ulster (d.1397)

Domnall (fl.1361–70)

Niall Óc ‘the Younger’ Governor of Irish of Ulster (d.1403)

Henry Aimréid ‘the Turbulent’ Tánaiste (d.1392)

Brian Óc Gt O’Neill (d.1404)

Áed Óc Lord of Trian Congail (d.1485)

Eógan Gt O’Neill (d.1456)

Henry Gt O’Neill (d.1489)

Domnall Boc, ‘the Generous’ Gt O’Neill (d.1432)

Áed ‘of the Fews’ Tánaiste (d.1475)

Niall Mór Lord of Trian Congail (d.1512)

Áed Buide III (d.1524)

Brian Ballach II (d.1529)

Niall Óc Ld of Trian Congail (d.1537)

Feidlim Bacach, ‘the Lame’

Brian

Sir Brian Lord of Lower Clandeboye (d.1574)

Niall Lord of Upper Clandeboye (d.1601)

Conn Mór Gt O’Neill (d.1493)

Art Óc Gt O’Neill (d.1519)

Domnall Clárach Gt O’Neill (d.1509)

Henry Óc Gt O’Neill (d.1498)

Conn Bacach Earl of Tyrone (d.1559)

Art Gt O’Neill (d.1513)

(O’Neills of the Fews)

Fig 10 Selective genealogy, illustrating the succession of the O’Neills of Tír Eógain (Tyrone) and the O’Neills of Clandeboy (south Antrim and north Down) from the late twelfth to early sixteenth centuries. Rulers’ names are in bold (note varying titles) and nicknames in italics.

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The Ulster earldom to the late thirteenth century O’Donnell kings of Tír Conaill (Donegal) Éicnechán Ó Domnaill Kg (d.1207) Domnall Mór Kg (d.1241) Gofraid Kg (d.1257)

Máelechlainn Kg (d.1247)

Domnall Óc Kg (d.1281) m. (1) dau. MacSuibne

m.(2) dau. MacDomnaill

(1) Áed Kg (d.1333) (1) m. dau. O’Gallagher (3) m. dau. O’Gormley

(1) Niall Garb I Kg (sl.1348 by Magnus)

(2) Conchobar Kg (sl.1342 by Niall)

Toirdelbach ‘an Fhína’, ‘of the Wine’ Kg (d.1423)

Áengus Kg (sl.1352 by Magnus)

Domnall (d.1420)

Domnall Kg (sl.1456 by Toirdelbach Cairbrech)

(2) Feidlim Kg (sl.1356 by Magnus)

(2) m. dau. Kg Magnus O’Conor (4) m. dau. O’Rourke (5) m. ‘Ingen Ruad’

(3) Art

(4) Magnus Meblach ‘the Treacherous’ ruled 1 yr 1359 (d.1363)

(5) 5 sons

Seaán Kg (sl.1380 by Toirdelbach)

Niall Garb II Kg (d.1439)

Nechtain Kg (sl. 1452 by sons of Niall II)

Áed Rúad Kg (d.1505)

Rugraide Kg (sl.1454 by Domnall)

Conn Kg (d.1497)

(2) Toirdelbach Kg (d.1303)

Toirdelbach Cairbrech (dep. 1461 by Áed)

Éicnechán Tánaiste (sl.1497 by Conn)

Áed Dub Kg (d.1537) Magnus Kg (dep. 1555 d.1563)

Fig. 11 Selective genealogy, illustrating the succession of the O’Donnells of Tír Conaill (Donegal), and their internecine strife from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries. Rulers’ names are in boldface and nicknames in italics.

Battle of Caimeirge (Cummery, just north of Omagh) in which ten other leading members of the MacLaughlin family were killed and their claim to kingship permanently extinguished.43 (See Fig. 11) 43 Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, p. 268; AU 2, pp 298–9 (AD1241); AFM 3, pp 302–3; Ann. Conn., pp 72–5.

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OF BRIAN O’NEILL

From O’Donnell’s point of view, the victory was too complete. No longer threatened by internal rivals, Brian O’Neill married Cecilia MacLaughlin,44 and took up her family’s cause against the threat of O’Donnell encroachment into Inishowen, going so far in 1248 as to support an O’Cannon (Ó Canannáin) candidate for the kingship of Tír Conaill.45 Cecilia’s Anglo-Norman name, which suggests she might have had an English mother or god-parent, bore witness to the MacLaughlin alliances with de Courcy and de Lacy over the last fifty years. All over Ireland, English or French names begin to appear in Gaelic families at this time, while the occurrence of Gaelic names in families of Anglo-Norman extraction was almost unknown.46 Meanwhile Hugh de Lacy died in the winter of 1242–3, and the earldom of Ulster was once more directly ruled by crown officials, perhaps in fulfilment of the terms of de Lacy’s reinstatement in 1227.47 English administrative records indicate that, for the first ten or eleven years of his reign, Brian O’Neill was paying an annual rent for his kingdom, at the increased rate of 400 cows a year.48 A circular letter from Henry III’s chancery in 1244, requesting aid from Irish chieftains for the English king’s war against the Scots, shows an accentuation of the control the English claimed over the Ulster Irish. In the 1221 letter to Áed Méith O’Neill, the Irish king was taken to represent the men of Cenél Eógain under his rule, if not the Ulster Irish generally. By contrast, the 1244 letter requested aid not merely from O’Donnell, king of Tír Conaill, and Brian O’Neill, king of Cenél Eógain, but from a list of sub-kings whom Brian would have claimed as vassals: O’Hanlon from the Armagh area, O’Cahan/Kane (Ó Catháin) and O’Henry (Ó hInneirge) from the present county Derry, MacCawell/Campbell (Mac Cathmail) from the Clogher Valley in Tyrone, Magennis (Mág Aengusa), MacCartan (Mac Artáin), MacGilmore (Mac Gilla Muire) and O’Flynn, who were all Irish of Ulaid, together with MacMahon of Airgialla (county Monaghan) and O’Gormley of Cenél Múáin (on the Tyrone– Donegal border).49 This detailed summons to Ulster chiefs, in comparison with the more cursory listing of major Gaelic chieftains from the rest of Ireland, may reflect a pre-existing list of Irish tenants of the Ulster earldom, now administered by the crown, suggesting that Hugh de Lacy by the end of his career had, in 44  AU 2, pp 312–13 (AD1250). 45  ALC 1, pp 382–3. 46  Freya Verstraten, ‘Naming practices among the Irish secular nobility in the high Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval History, 32 (2006), 43–53. See however Smith, Colonization and conquest, p. 82, on the Gaelic forename of Mahon de Cruys. 47 Brown, Hugh de Lacy, first earl of Ulster, p. 167. 48 J.T. Gilbert (ed.), Facsimiles of the national manuscripts of Ireland (4 vols, Dublin, 1874–84), 2, plate 73. This reproduces an account roll indicating Brian Ó Néill did not begin defaulting on his rent until 1252. 49 CDI 1, no. 2716; Close rolls of the reign of Henry III … 1227–[1272] (14 vols, London, 1902–38), 1242–7, pp 254–5.

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effect, replaced O’Neill or MacLaughlin as the provincial overlord of Ulster, with O’Neill viewed as merely one among a number of vassal-chieftains subject to de Lacy’s rule. However, Brian O’Neill during his reign ruthlessly brought sub-kings of Ulster back under his own authority, apparently employing ‘routs’, or bands of mercenary soldiers, to achieve this end.50 In 1248, the year he tried unsuccessfully to install an O’Cannon puppet-king over Tír Conaill, the Annals of Ulster style Brian ‘high-king of the North of Ireland’. The justiciar, John fitz Geoffrey, brought a royal hosting to Coleraine in this year, built a bridge over the Lower Bann and a castle on the western bank at Drumtarsy (or Killowen), taking submission and hostages from the Cenél Eógain.51 As McNeill points out, the castle at Drumtarsy was probably designed to protect the newly colonized district of Tweskard (from tuaiscert, ‘north’), in north Antrim. This was the old territory of Dál Riata, which had been formerly granted to the Scottish lords, Thomas and Alan fitz Roland of Galloway, by King John, and had been excluded from the restoration of the Ulster earldom to de Lacy in 1227, but regained by Earl Hugh through a mixture of marriage alliance and military action.52 From at least 1254, a local noble, Sir Henry de Mandeville, held the office of custos or warden of Tweskard,53 but whether it was now legally part of the earldom of Ulster was a doubtful matter, contributing to disturbances inside the earldom in 1273.54 Brian’s interference in Connacht affairs in 1250 provoked a retaliatory raid against Telach Óc (Tullyhogue) from Maurice Fitzgerald, the lord of Sligo and would-be conqueror of Tír Conaill.55 A further raid by the justiciar in 1252 forced O’Neill to submit, yield his brother as hostage and promise a payment of 3,092 cows as a penalty for rebellion.56 This was his last submission. Brian went on to form an alliance with the heir to the kingship of Connacht, Áed O’Conor, from 1255 onwards, attacking the O’Reillys (Uí Raigillig) of Breifne on their northern borders, taking their hostages and then, in 1258, handing them over to O’Conor. In return, Áed acknowledged Brian as high-king of Ireland, in a meeting at Cáel-uisce (near Belleek), which was also attended by Tadc, the heir to the O’Brien lordship of Thomond, or north Munster (by then 50 AU 2, pp 302–3, 314–15; Simms, ‘Medieval Armagh’, pp 193–4; Simms, ‘Late medieval Tír Eoghain’, pp 136–9. 51 Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 128–9; AFM 3, pp 328–31, Ann. Conn., pp 94–5, AU 2, pp 308–11. 52 McNeill, Anglo-Norman Ulster, p. 22; CDI 1, nos. 1218, 1219, 1473; Orpen, Normans, 3, pp 255–6 [252–3]; Seán Duffy, ‘The lords of Galloway, earls of Carrick, and the Bissets of the Glens: Scottish settlement in thirteenth-century Ulster’ in Regions and rulers, pp 37–50. 53 Gilbert, Facsimiles, 2, plate 73; CDI 2, no. 412. 54 Below, p. 103. 55 Ann. Conn., pp 102–3, ALC 1, pp 392–5. On Connacht affairs at this time see Freya Verstraten, ‘Both king and vassal: Feidlim Ua Conchobair of Connacht, 1230–65’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 55 (2003), 15–37: 23–4. 56 Gilbert, Facsimiles, 2, plate 73; ‘Catalogue of the Great Rolls of the Pipe, reign of Henry III’ in Rep. DKPRI, no. 35 (Dublin, 1903), Appendix III, pp 29–50, at p. 39; Cal. Carew MSS, 5, p. 433; AU 2, pp 314–15; AFM 3, pp 344–7.

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largely reduced to what is present-day county Clare). However an attempt in the same year to obtain submission from the young, newly inaugurated king of Tír Conaill, Domnall Óc O’Donnell, failed,57 not surprisingly, in view of the O’Neill–O’Donnell rivalry for control of the peninsula of Inishowen, and Brian’s earlier effort to install an O’Cannon instead of an O’Donnell as king of Tír Conaill. Domnall Óc O’Donnell not only refused to accept Brian O’Neill’s overlordship, he retaliated in 1259 by a destructive invasion of Tír Eógain in an effort to depose Brian from the kingship of Tír Eógain, and replace him with his cousin and rival, Áed Buide (‘the yellow-haired’) O’Neill.58 (See Fig. 10 above) Ignoring these warning signs of growing opposition to his rule among the Irish themselves, in 1260 Brian joined with Áed O’Conor on a major invasion of the Ulster earldom, where the Irish of Ulaid were already in rebellion,59 only to be defeated and killed at the Battle of Down. The annals say there was great slaughter on the defeated side of the sub-chiefs of Tír Eógain and Connacht, including the new head of the MacLaughlin family, who was by then a vassal of Brian. According to the Annals of Inisfallen, ‘Brian Ó Néill was slain by the Gaedil themselves, and by some of the foreigners’.60 This reference to Gaelic troops allied to the English who defeated Brian at Down is of considerable interest. It may be no coincidence that the accounts for 1261–2 from Henry de Mandeville, warden of Tweskard, included a payment of £10 ‘to Áed Buide O’Neill and his followers (sociis suis) which the Lord Edward retained in his service for keeping peace in the marches of Ulster.’61 The rivalry between Brian ‘of the Battle of Down’ and his cousin Áed Buide, grandson of Áed Méith O’Neill, was ultimately to divide the O’Neill dynasty into two branches, which became known as the O’Neills of Tír Eogain (descended from Brian) and the O’Neills of Clandeboy (Clann Áeda Buide, ‘the descendants of Áed Buide’), who were located in south Antrim from the mid-fourteenth century.

D E B U R G H – O ’ N E I L L C O O P E R AT I O N

Áed Buide now became king of Tír Eógain. Initially there was an unsuccessful attempt to replace him with his brother, Niall Cúlánach O’Neill (‘N. of the long back-hair’, implying he sported a warrior-cult hairstyle).62 Perhaps Áed’s earlier 57 Orpen, Normans, 3, pp 272–7 [417–20]; Simms, ‘Late medieval Tír Eoghain’, pp 137–8. The fourteenth-century Munster text edited as O’Grady, Caithréim, 1, p. 3; 2, p. 3, claims that Tadc O’Brien expected to receive the high-kingship himself, and left the meeting at Cáel-uisce without submitting to Ó Néill, but this may be later propaganda. 58 AFM 3, pp 374–5. 59 CDI 2, nos. 411, 412; ALC 1, pp 424–5 (1257). 60 AI, pp 360–1. 61 Edmund Curtis, ‘Sheriffs’ accounts of the honor of Dungarvan, of Tweskard in Ulster and of county Waterford’, PRIA, 39C (1931), 1–17: 10–11. 62 On Niall’s hairstyle, see Simms, ‘Gaelic

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association with O’Donnell might have made him a less acceptable candidate in English eyes. However Niall Cúlánach’s effort to take the kingship of Tír Eógain was foiled, first by O’Donnell’s hostile invasions, and second, by an alliance formed between Áed Buide and the new earl of Ulster, Walter de Burgh. Since the death of Earl Hugh de Lacy, the earldom had been retained in the hands of royal officials, perhaps as a consequence of the agreement under which de Lacy had recovered his earldom in 1227. However Brian O’Neill’s invasions against the colonists in eastern Ulster, and his attempt to revive the highkingship of Ireland, underlined England’s need for a strong resident magnate to control the area. Walter de Burgh, who was already lord of Connacht, greatnephew, on his mother’s side, of Hugh de Lacy, was granted the earldom of Ulster in 1263. It was characteristic of the contrast between the policy of royal officials and the methods of resident Anglo-Irish barons, that de Burgh immediately formed an alliance with his principal Irish vassal-chief, Áed Buide O’Neill, sealed by Áed’s marriage to the earl’s cousin, Eleanor de Nangle. Thereafter Áed Buide, in a reversal of his previous position, joined forces with de Burgh to attack O’Donnell.63 The close relations between the kings of Tír Eógain and the earls of Ulster during Áed’s long reign to 1283, and the shorter reigns of his brother Niall Cúlánach (d.1291) and son, Brian II (d.1296), typify a general development of the later thirteenth century both in the rest of Ulster and across Ireland. The appointment of Walter de Burgh to govern the Ulster earldom in place of a régime of royal officials was part of a wider policy by the English government to delegate its powers. The financial demands of Edward I’s wars in Scotland, Wales and Gascony was putting an intolerable strain on the declining revenues from the Irish lordship at this time. To ensure peace at home at the cheapest possible price, the English crown shifted emphasis from direct administration of the colony by salaried officials, to greater reliance on the major frontier barons to administer and defend their own areas, using their own military resources and acting in their own interest.64 In turn, such marcher lords relied on ‘trustworthy’ Irish chieftains as instruments of local government, cultivating close ties with them through marriage and fosterage. The chieftains paid tribute, surrendered hostages, and pledged themselves to levy debts or fines owed to Englishmen by the Irish in their territories, to repress robbers and brigands operating over their frontiers, and to guarantee the safety of their Anglo-Irish neighbours when

warfare’, p. 101. Below, pp 404–6, Figs 29, 30. 63 AFM 3, pp 380–1, 384–5; AU 2, pp 328– 31, 334–9. See Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., p. 196; Orpen, Normans, 3, pp 266–7, 284–5 [414–15, 423]. 64 J.F. Lydon, ‘Ireland in 1297: “At peace after its own manner”’ in James Lydon (ed.), Law and disorder in thirteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 1997), pp 11–24, at p. 22; Cormac Ó Cléirigh, ‘The problems of defence: a regional case-study’, ibid., pp 25–56, at pp 37–8, 41–6, 53–6.

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travelling in or near Irish territory, going to cut wood or turf on the fringes of frontier settlements, or grazing flocks in exposed areas. Áed Buide O’Neill was not the only Ulster leader who cooperated in this way. Others were Echmarcach and Cú Ulad O’Hanlon, successive kings of Airthir in the modern county Armagh, Áengus and Gillapátraic MacMahon, chiefs of Cremourne and Farney in county Monaghan, O’Cahan in north Derry and O’Flynn in south Antrim.65 In the rest of Ireland this era of active cooperation between certain chieftains and the colonists formed the background to a request forwarded to King Edward I by leading Irish clergy of the archdiocese and province of Cashel, who between 1276 and 1280 offered the English king 7,000 marks, a sum later raised to 10,000 marks, if he would grant full rights under English common law to all freeborn Irishmen outside Ulster. In return, the clerics offered to excommunicate and place under interdict all who persisted in using the ‘evil’ Irish customary ‘Brehon law’ thereafter.66 The Irish of Ulster may have been omitted from the proposal because of the Ulster earldom’s greater jurisdictional autonomy, or because Earl Walter de Burgh had died in 1271, and his son and heir Richard was still a minor, so that his lands had once again been taken into the care of royal officials. There was a principle, based on Magna Carta, that the rights of a tenant-in-chief who was still a minor, in this case the young Earl Richard, should not be diminished while his lands and lordship were in the king’s hands. In any case, although Edward I favoured the request for equal rights for the Gaelic Irish in the rest of Ireland, the proposal came to nothing, blocked, it would seem, because the barons of Ireland withheld their consent, unwilling to lose their power as ‘middlemen’ between the Irish nobles and the English king. There were two drawbacks from the English government’s point of view to the policy of delegating authority. One was that the chieftains developed closer ties with the marcher lords who ‘handled’ them than with the crown, and followed their patrons to war even in support of feuds between Anglo-Irish families, or rebellion against the government. This was demonstrated during the disturbances that arose after the premature death of Earl Walter de Burgh in 1271. During his lifetime, Earl Walter seems to have resided in Connacht and entrusted his seneschal of Ulster, Sir Henry de Mandeville, with managing the earldom and relationships with the Ulster chiefs. Initially de Mandeville was allowed to continue in the office of seneschal during the young heir’s minority. Indeed the submissions of the Ulster chiefs were excluded from the interference of royal administrators as a result of a curious decision by the justiciar and escheator of Ireland that made the chiefs’ service part of the dower granted to 65 Katharine Simms, ‘Relations with the Irish’, ibid., pp 66–73; Smith, Colonization and conquest, pp 82–7. 66 A.J. Otway-Ruthven, ‘The request of the Irish for English law, 1277– 1280’, IHS, 6 (1949), 261–70: 269; eadem, ‘The native Irish and English law in medieval Ireland’, IHS, 7 (1950–1), 1–16; eadem, Med. Ire., p. 189; Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Edward I and the proposed purchase of English law for the Irish, c.1279–80’, Transactions of the Royal Historical

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the widowed countess of Ulster, Emmeline or Avelina. The effectiveness of de Mandeville’s stewardship was demonstrated when in 1271, following Earl Walter’s death, Áed Buide O’Neill, his close ally Cú Muige O’Cahan, and other Ulster chiefs submitted to the justiciar, James d’Audley, and received gifts of robes, furs and saddles.67 However the sympathetic d’Audley died in an accidental fall from his horse, and the justiciarship of Ireland passed to Maurice Fitzgerald, whose whole family were involved in a feud against the de Burghs. Under Fitzgerald, Sir Henry de Mandeville was immediately replaced by a new seneschal, Sir William FitzWarin. FitzWarin appealed against the extraordinary allocation of the frontier castles of Ulster and the submissions of the Irish chiefs to form part of the dower of the widowed countess of Ulster. He also accused Henry de Mandeville of unjustly retaining the land of Tweskard (the former Scots grants in north Antrim) in his own hands, whereas FitzWarin considered them part of the earldom, and that he had used his authority as seneschal to favour the kingship of Cú Muige O’Cahan (in present north county Derry), whose father Magnus, ‘a traitor to the king and the Lord Edward’, had died in rebellion at the Battle of Down. Under this provocation, in 1273, de Mandeville rose out in war, and brought Áed Buide O’Neill and Cú Muige O’Cahan to lay waste FitzWarin’s lands, while FitzWarin himself was able to muster support from Áed Buide’s own brother and former rival, Niall Cúlánach O’Neill. We still have the text of a letter of complaint from FitzWarin’s Irish allies, each appending their formal titles. They included not only Niall Cúlánach, styling himself ‘king of Inis Eogain’ (Inishowen peninsula), but also MacDonleavy, ‘king of the Irish of Ulster’ (or Ulaid); Muirchertach O’Flynn, ‘king of Uí Thuirtre’ (south Antrim); Echmarcach O’Hanlon, normally described as ‘king of Airthir’ (south Armagh) but here calling himself ‘king of Airgialla’, no doubt in celebration of the fact that earlier in that year of 1273 he had, in alliance with the Cenél Eogain, defeated and killed Echaid  MacMahon, king of Airgialla (approximately Monaghan); Diarmait MacGilmore, ‘king of Uí Erca Céin’ (interior of north county Down) and MacCartan ‘king of Uí Echach’ (barony of Iveagh, south county Down). In this letter they complained that they had ‘at the instance of the seneschal endeavoured with all their might to pursue and rout the King’s Irish enemies’. Since the rebels enjoyed the favour of ‘some of the council of Ireland’, they had been granted the king’s peace on unduly lenient terms and these council members now ‘at the instigation of those enemies endeavour to oppress the writers’.68 One of these indulgent councillors was probably John de Verdon, who Society, 5th ser., 10 (1960), 111–27. 67 CDI 2, no. 890. 68 CDI 2, nos. 952, 953. The original Latin text of no. 953 in Rymer, Foedera, 1, pt II, p. 520, contains the reference to the over-lenient granting of peace to the offenders, which is omitted from the calendared version. O’Flynn of Uí Thuirtre associated himself with the supporters of FitzWarin in this letter, but is elsewhere accused of attacking the colony at de Mandeville’s behest – CDI 2, p. 433. See

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negotiated the peace with Áed Buide O’Neill at this time, and reported that the king of Cenél Eógain was using the title ‘king of all the Irish of Ireland’,69 presumably basking in the reflected glory of his predecessor and former rival, Brian of the Battle of Down. Subsequent events indicate that the party supporting the de Mandeville family in their revolt against the interference of crown officials included the de Burghs themselves. In 1280 the young Earl Richard de Burgh came of age, and although Sir Henry de Mandeville himself had been killed in the war, the earl appointed his son Sir Thomas de Mandeville as seneschal, and permitted him to bring in Cú Muige O’Cahan and the apparently politically flexible O Flynn of Uí Thuirtre, to plunder and destroy FitzWarin’s lands once more.70 The other problem raised by the close identification of certain chieftains with the interests of the Anglo-Irish colonists was that it seems to have aroused opposition among the Gaelic chiefs’ own subjects, and support for alternative leaders who were hostile to English authority. Within the Monaghan area, Brian na Coilech Aifrinn MacMahon (‘B. of the Mass-Chalices’), king of Airgialla 1273–1311, had little reason to love the English, who had encouraged the king of Airthir, Echmarcach O’Hanlon, to claim the title ‘king of Airgialla’ for himself, and to assert authority over Brian’s kinsman Áengus MacMahon, chief of Cremourne in Monaghan.71 He had still less reason to love the Cenél Eógain, who the annals tell us had joined with O’Hanlon to kill his father Echaid MacMahon, king of Airgialla, in 1273. The existence of the above-mentioned letter suggests that Echmarcach O’Hanlon’s Cenél Eógain ally on this occasion may have been not Áed Buide, but Echmarcach’s associate in support of the seneschal FitzWarin, Niall Cúlánach O’Neill. Within Tír Eógain itself, the ‘antiEnglish’ claimant to the throne was Domnall O’Neill, son of the late ‘high-king’, Brian of the Battle of Down (d.1260). In 1281 the king of Tír Conaill, Domnall Óc O’Donnell, brought an invading army deep into Tír Eógain before he was defeated and killed at Desertcreat by the joint forces of Áed Buide O’Neill and the seneschal Sir Thomas de Mandeville. Since we are told that Domnall O’Neill, son of Brian of the Battle of Down, was married to Gormlaith, the daughter of O’Donnell, this major, if unsuccessful, expedition by Domnall Óc may well have been undertaken in support of the claims of his son-in-law to the kingship of Tír Eógain.72 Orpen, Normans, 4, pp 133–6 [501–3]. 69 CDI 1, no. 1840. This anonymous document, which is misdated by Sweetman, can be established in its correct context by its reference to Fromund le Brun, chancellor of Ireland 1260–83, by John de Verdon’s mention of his manor at Coolock, and by his allusion to another peace he had recently negotiated with Art Ó Máelsechlainn, ‘king of Delvin’, recorded in the Irish pipe rolls for February 1273 – ‘Catalogue of the Great Rolls of the Pipe, 1–12 Edw. I’ in Rep. DKPRI, no. 36 (Dublin, 1904), Appendix, pp 22–77, at p. 37. 70  CDI 2, no. 1918. 71  Simms, ‘Medieval Armagh’, pp 195–7. 72 Simms, ‘Tír Eoghain “North of the Mountain”’, pp 161–2.

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Another and more effective blow, paving the way for Domnall O’Neill’s rise to kingship, came in 1283 when Brian ‘of the Mass-Chalices’ MacMahon, king of Airgialla (Monaghan area), successfully fought and killed Áed Buide O’Neill, the pro-English king of Tír Eógain, thus avenging the death of his own father, Echaid MacMahon, killed by O’Hanlon and the Cenél Eógain ten years previously. The Latin Annals of Ulster tell us that in the same year came the first sign of a succession dispute in Tír Conaill, between the sons of Domnall Óc O’Donnell. The two sons of Domnall Óc were both offspring of marriage alliances with the Scottish chiefs of the west Highlands and Islands. Áed O’Donnell was son of a daughter of MacSweeney (Mac Suibne) of Argyll, while Toirdelbach was the offspring of a second marriage between Domnall Óc O’Donnell and a kinswoman of Aengus Mór MacDonald (Mac Domnaill), lord of Islay. (See above, Fig. 11) It appears that Áed O’Donnell, the elder son, had taken power at first, and that subsequently his brother Toirdelbach had risen in revolt, and expelled Áed eastward from Tír Conaill into Tír Eógain, leading to the devastation of west Tír Eógain by ‘O’Donnell’ – whether the annal entry is applying the chiefly title here to the fleeing Áed or the pursuing Toirdelbach is not clear. Nor is the chronology for this incident quite firm, but it appears Áed shortly recovered his kingship.73 The new earl of Ulster, Richard de Burgh, had been raised in England meanwhile, and remained there for some years after his coming of age in 1280. However in 1286 he crossed over to Ireland with a substantial army to assert his authority in his vast territories there, which included much fertile land in the east and south of Ireland, as well as his lordship over 25 of the 30 cantreds constituting the province of Connacht and, in theory, the whole province of Ulster. First he devastated the unruly province of Connacht, including many church sites there, to the disapproval of the Connacht annalist, who admits he obtained sway, nevertheless, in every place through which he passed, and received the hostages of all Connacht; and he afterwards took with him the army of Connacht, and obtained the hostages of Cenel-Conaill and Cenel-Eoghain; and he deposed Domhnall, son of Brian O’Neill, and gave the sovereignty to Niall Culanach O’Neill, on this occasion.74 At the time of Earl Richard’s first expedition into Ulster in 1286, the ruler of Tír Conaill would seem to have been Áed son of Domnall Óc O’Donnell, who was allowed to remain in kingship in return for surrendering hostages to guarantee his submission to the earl. However, on 20 September 1286, Richard 73 ALC 1, pp 528–9, say that Toirdelbach O’Donnell had spent twelve years ‘in kingship and out of it’ when his brother Áed defeated and slew him in the Battle of Cnoc an Madma (1303), putting his first spell in kingship 1290/1. 74 ALC 1, p. 495 (AD1286).

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de Burgh, earl of Ulster, known more familiarly to the Irish as ‘an tIarla Ruad’, the ‘Red Earl’ (better, ‘the red-haired earl’), may have acquired an interest in supporting Toirdelbach O’Donnell against his brother. He entered into a somewhat mysterious treaty known as the ‘Turnberry Band’ with leading Scots lords, in which the Scots, including the Bruces and Angus Mór MacDonald of Islay and Alexander MacDonald his son, promised support to the ‘Red Earl’ and his friend, Sir Thomas de Clare, ‘in all their affairs’.75 Not long after, in 1290, Áed O’Donnell’s kingship of Tír Conaill was challenged by his half-brother, Toirdelbach, and the annals say Toirdelbach was supported by his mother’s family, the Clann Domnaill (MacDonalds of Scotland) ‘and many other galloglasses’.76 This is the first time that galloglasses – Hebridean mercenary troops – are mentioned in the Irish annals by name, but 120 Hebridean soldiers had been imported by Áed O’Conor, heir to the kingship of Connacht, in 1259, and a certain ‘MacSomurli king of Argyll’ had fought against the Fitzgerald lord of Sligo at the side of Máelsechlainn O’Donnell as early as 1247. Galloglasses were to become a constant element in Gaelic chieftains’ armies in Ulster and north Connacht from the late thirteenth century onwards. In the case of the O’Donnell succession dispute, however, where both candidates were related to Scottish galloglass clans, the struggle remained indecisive till 1303. Similarly in Tír Eógain, there was a prolonged power struggle at this time. There is some evidence that Brian ‘of the Battle of Down’ O’Neill (d.1260) had married a MacDougall (Mac Dubgaill) of Argyll, who became the mother of his son Domnall (d.1325), and it is certain that Domnall O’Neill used galloglasses in his struggle to succeed to his father’s kingship over Tír Eógain. On the other side, the line of Áed Buide O’Neill was supported by the ‘Red Earl’ Richard de Burgh’s forces. When Domnall killed his rival Niall Cúlánach O’Neill in 1291, Áed Buide’s son Brian II was made king by de Mandeville, almost certainly Sir Thomas de Mandeville, then seneschal of Ulster, and Sir Hugh Byset, lord of the Glens of Antrim, acting in obedience to the earl’s wishes. However Domnall O’Neill returned to the attack, and defeated and killed Brian II at the Battle of Creeve in 1296, despite the presence of English troops on Brian’s side.77 Brian II O’Neill left a son, significantly christened Henry, no doubt in compliment to Sir Henry de Mandeville, but he appears to have been still underage, and Domnall was left in the kingship thereafter. It is likely that Domnall consented to pay tribute to the earl at this time, because the year 1300 marks a high point in the power and extent of the Ulster 75  Seán Duffy, ‘The Turnberry Band’ in Seán Duffy (ed.), Princes, prelates and poets in medieval Ireland: essays in honour of Katharine Simms (Dublin, 2013), pp 124–38. 76 Ibid., pp 130–3; Ann. Conn., pp 184–5; ALC 1, pp 500–1. 77 Simms, ‘Late medieval Tír Eoghain’, pp 142–3. On the presence of the Bysets in the Glens of Antrim, see Duffy, ‘The lords of Galloway’ in Regions and rulers, pp 37–50.

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Fig. 12 The castle of Northburgh, now Greencastle, Inishowen. Roger Stalley collection © TRIARC Trinity Irish Art Research Centre.

earldom. Already in 1296, Earl Richard de Burgh granted his castle on the river Roe (in the modern county Derry), together with its associated borough and demesne lands, and the services of his English tenants in the area, to the Scottish lord James Stewart, who had married de Burgh’s sister Egidia. The peninsula of Inishowen, which had been ruled by Niall Cúlánach O’Neill in the lifetime of Áed Buide, in 1300 belonged to a William de Burgh, who transferred it in that year by charter to Earl Richard de Burgh. In 1305, Earl Richard built the great castle of Northburgh on the east coast of Inishowen, overlooking the estuary of Lough Foyle (see Fig. 12), while at the same time he pressurized the bishops of Derry and Raphoe into handing over to him much of the church land they owned in the port of Derry itself. He was presumably intending to develop the port as a secular trading centre.78 78 McNeill, Anglo-Norman Ulster, pp 31–2; Simms, ‘Tír Eoghain “North of the Mountain”’, p. 162; Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., p. 214; Orpen, Normans, 4, pp 142, 145–6 [506–8].

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Fig. 13 Galloglass bodyguard surrounding O’Cahan tomb, Dungiven, Co. Derry. Edwin Rae collection © TRIARC Trinity Irish Art Research Centre.

English settlers from north Ulster, perhaps Tweskard (Gaill in Tuaisceirt), were to take part on Toirdelbach’s side in the final battle between the two rival O’Donnell kings at Cnoc in Madma in 1303, in which Áed O’Donnell defeated and killed Toirdelbach, after the latter had had twelve years of intermittent kingship.79 Just as the Red Earl, or his de Mandeville seneschals, seem to have tolerated Domnall O’Neill in the kingship of Tir Eógain after his victory over their candidate Brian II at the Battle of Creeve in 1296, so they left Áed O’Donnell in possession after his victory over his half-brother Toirdelbach at Cnoc an Madma – ‘so that after a while his government was like a sea growing calm, a tide ebbing, and a high wind subsiding’ as the annalist remarks exultantly.80 Complaints by the bishop of Clogher and the archbishop of Armagh let us  know that by 1297 Domnall O’Neill, king of Tír Eógain, Brian ‘of the 79 Simms, ‘Relations with the Irish’, pp 70–3.

80 ALC 1, pp 528–9 (AD1303).

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Mass-Chalices’ MacMahon, king of Airgialla, and Donn Maguire (Mág Uidir), king of Fir Manach (Fermanagh), were all employing Scottish ‘retainers’ (satellites), and their investment in such heavy-armoured foot soldiers may help to explain their success in holding onto power against opposition from the earl and his allies.81 A mid-fourteenth-century assessment of the fullest extent of the lordship exercised by the earls of Ulster in their heyday lists all the Ulster chieftains, including even O’Donnell, king of Tír Conaill, and Maguire, king of Fir Manach, as tribute-paying vassals of the earl, each with an obligation to maintain a certain quota of billeted soldiers from the earl’s mercenary troop in peacetime, constantly ready to serve him when summoned to war.82 This estimate probably has reference to the period around 1300, when Toirdelbach O’Donnell was apparently ruling with the support of the Red Earl, Richard de Burgh, and the earl was consolidating his grip on the province west of the river Bann. However, the appearance on the scene of Scottish mercenaries in the service of the Ulster chiefs commenced a levelling of the balance of power which was to bring dramatic changes in the next century. (See Fig. 13)

81  John Marsden, Galloglas: Hebridean and West Highland mercenary warrior kindreds in medieval Ireland (East Linton, 2003), pp 30, 44–5, 62–3, 65; W.D.H. Sellar, ‘Hebridean seakings: the successors of Somerled, 1164–1316’ in E.J. Cowan and R.A. McDonald (eds), Alba: Celtic Scotland in the medieval era (East Linton, 2000), pp 187–218, at pp 201, 206–8; Simms, ‘Gaelic warfare’, pp 110–11; Nicholls, ‘The register of Clogher’, 417–18, 422–3. 82 On the ‘Bonnacht of Ulster’ see Simms, ‘Gaelic warfare’, pp 108–10; and below, pp 122–3.

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CHAPTER

4

The fourteenth century: absenteeism and Gaelic recovery T H E B RU C E I N VA S I O N

The use of imported Scottish galloglass by Irish rulers in Connacht and Ulster from the late thirteenth century onwards was one of the necessary preconditions to what has been termed the ‘Gaelic Recovery’ or ‘Gaelic Resurgence’, the reassertion of political independence by many Irish chieftains that took place during the course of the fourteenth century. All over Ireland, both chiefs and Anglo-Irish barons now employed freelance bands of light-armed Irish footsoldiers, the notorious ceithirne, ‘war-bands’, or ‘kernes’. The de Burghs in early fourteenth-century Connacht also hired a ‘rout’ (Ir. rúta) or troop of 200 professional axemen not unlike galloglasses, but led by the Welsh MacQuillin or Howelin family, who had also served under the chief Áed Breifnech O’Conor (d.1310). Warfare in Ireland was essentially regional and small-scale, with little contrast between the personnel and tactics of the Irish and Anglo-Irish. The hard-pressed king’s council at Dublin resorted, on occasion, to hiring the forces of Connacht and Ulster chieftains, such as Echmarcach O’Hanlon of Airthir, and Philip O’Reilly of east Breifne, to assist the royal army against the rebellious Irish of the Leinster mountains.1 The colony was ill-prepared to meet the challenge of war on a national scale. Yet across the North Channel Edward I’s role as arbitrator in the disputed succession to the Scottish throne had led to a series of military interventions and heavy-handed conditions for submission that sparked off a full-scale Scottish war of independence under Robert Bruce. The ‘Red Earl’ of Ulster, Richard de Burgh, had been prominent among the Anglo-Irish barons who brought armed contingents to join King Edward’s Scottish expeditions in 1296 and 1303, but he had also given his daughter Elisabeth in marriage to Robert Bruce in 1302, when the latter was still merely earl of Carrick.2 From 1306 onwards the conflict threatened to spread to Ireland, as Bruce, now king of Scotland, sent his agents 1 P.M. Connolly, ‘An account of military expenditure in Leinster, 1308’, Anal. Hib., 30 (1982), 1–5; Simms, ‘Gaelic warfare’, pp 108–10; Robin Frame, Ireland and Britain, 1170–1450 (London and Rio Grande, OH, 1998), pp 228–9, 293–7; Simms, ‘Medieval Armagh’, p. 196. 2 J.F. Lydon, ‘An Irish army in Scotland, 1296’, Irish Sword, 5 (1961–2), 184–90; OtwayRuthven, Med. Ire., pp 217–18, 225; Gilbert, Chart. St Mary’s, 2, pp 326, 331.

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into Ulster, seeking alliance with the Irish chiefs and perhaps even with some of the Ulster colonists.3 However, when Robert’s brother Edward Bruce actually landed near Larne in May 1315 with an invading army of 6,000 Scots veterans, he came as the ally of Domnall O’Neill, and the earl of Ulster was to be the main sufferer from his activities. Edward Bruce laid waste the lands of the earldom, had himself declared ‘king of Ireland’ and defeated Earl Richard de Burgh and his army at the Battle of Connor in September 1315. For the remainder of Edward Bruce’s three-year campaign until his final defeat and death at the Battle of Faughart near Dundalk, 14 October 1318, the so-called ‘king of Ireland’ spent the bulk of his time in eastern Ulster, where he held courts of justice for the local inhabitants, and issued royal letters patent. His expeditions into the south of Ireland, even when joined by his brother, King Robert Bruce, with additional forces in 1317, won no permanent gains. The failure of the Irish in general to rise up in whole-hearted support of the Scots meant that the further the invading army went from the north-eastern coast of Ulster, the greater became their difficulties in provisioning their troops, a problem greatly exacerbated by the coincidental 1315–18 north European famine, brought about by constant rain.4 The rain itself was a public relations disaster, since the learned classes of Gaelic Ireland habitually associated sun, warmth and good harvests with Heaven’s judgement in favour of a just and legitimate king, and declared the disastrous weather and resulting famine to be a supernatural condemnation of Edward Bruce’s tyrannical usurpation.5 Nevertheless Domnall O’Neill had vigorously supported Edward’s cause, explaining in the famous ‘Remonstrance of the Irish Princes’ to Pope John XXII that, as he was undoubtedly the legitimate heir to the kingship of all Ireland, he was fully entitled to pass on his claim to sovereignty to Edward Bruce.6 The Remonstrance was a joint letter from the Irish supporters of Edward Bruce, under the named leadership of Domnall O’Neill, ‘king of Ulster’ (rex Ultonie), protesting against the English government’s move to get the Pope to excommunicate them as having broken their oath of allegiance. It makes counter3 Frame, Ireland and Britain, pp 72–3, 91–3; Seán Duffy, ‘The Bruce brothers and the Irish Sea world, 1306–1329’, CMCS, 21 (Summer 1991), 55–86: 64–6, 83–4. 4 Frame, Ireland and Britain, pp 74–98; H.S. Lucas, ‘The great European famine of 1315, 1316 and 1317’ Speculum, 5:4 (Oct. 1930), 343–77: 356–60. 5  Ann. Conn., pp 252–3; see Breandán Ó Buachalla, ‘Aodh Eanghach and the Irish king-hero’ in Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Liam Breatnach and Kim McCone (eds), Sages, saints and storytellers: Celtic studies in honour of Professor James Carney (Maynooth, 1989), pp 200–32, at pp 204–6; Damian McManus ‘“The smallest man in Ireland can reach the tops of her trees”: images of the king’s peace and bounty in bardic poetry’ in J.F. Nagy (ed.), Memory and the modern in Celtic literatures, CSANA Yearbook 5 (Dublin, 2006), pp 61–117; McCone, Pagan past, pp 108, 129–31, 139. 6 D.E.R. Watt et al., Walter Bower: Scotichronicon, 6 (Aberdeen, 1991), pp 384–403; Edmund Curtis and R.B. McDowell (eds), Irish historical documents (London, 1943), pp 38–46.

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accusations of misgovernment and betrayal, partly against the English crown, but still more against the Anglo-Irish colonists, together with a proud summary of Ireland’s long history as an independent nation that is reminiscent of the later Scottish ‘Declaration of Arbroath’, another quasi-nationalist document produced under the influence of Bruce. Many sections of the Remonstrance deal with incidents of treason by the ‘middle nation’ of the Anglo-Irish nobility, and examples of legal and clerical grievances against English rule more directly relevant to the plight of the southern Irish, but there can be no doubt that Domnall himself actively chose the title, ‘king of Ulster’, which is applied to him in this document. Also from this period are O’Neill’s letters patent issued in favour of the ‘archbishop of Armagh’ (perhaps the defeated candidate for that title, Friar Michael MacLaughlin, rather than the Anglo-Norman incumbent Roland de Jorz),7 renouncing any claim to the archbishop’s land of ‘Glenaule’ (parish of Eglish, county Armagh) and promising in the name of himself, his wife Gormlaith, daughter of O’Donnell, and their eldest son Seaán, that no secular taxation or services would in future be imposed by them on clergy and church tenants. In this document Domnall refers to Bruce as ‘Edward, by the grace of God king of Ireland’, and to himself as rex Hibernicorum Ultonie (‘king of the Irish of Ulster’).8 This Latin phrase, when used by MacDonleavy in the letter of 1273, written in support of the seneschal William FitzWarin, could be translated ‘king of the Irish of Ulaid’, that is, of the Irish living east of the Bann. When used by Domnall O’Neill, who was based in Tír Eógain, the same phrase must now refer to the prehistoric boundaries of Ulaid, to the whole of ‘Conchobar’s Province’ as claimed on behalf of Áed Méith O’Neill in his deathnotice under the year 1230.9 The Annals of Inisfallen in recording Domnall’s victory over Brian II, son of Áed Buide O’Neill, at the Battle of Creeve in 1296, state that he immediately took over ‘the kingship of the province of Ulster’ (rigi Cughid Ulad).10 As in the case of Áed Méith, this may refer to O’Neill’s overlordship of the Ulaid – the Irish chiefs living east of the Bann, such as O’Flynn, MacGilmore, and MacCartan – replacing the former hegemony of MacDonleavy. O’Neill’s reward for supporting Edward Bruce if the Scottish invasion had proved successful would have been to replace the earl of Ulster (known in Irish as Iarla Ulad) and become ruler of all the north of Ireland.11 Other Irish chiefs, rather than actively supporting the Scots invasion, simply took advantage of Bruce’s initial defeat of Richard de Burgh at the Battle of 7 J.R.S. Phillips, ‘The remonstrance revisited: England and Ireland in the early fourteenth century’ in T.G. Fraser and Keith Jeffery (eds), Men, women and war: papers read before the XXth Irish conference of historians, held at Magee College, University of Ulster, 6–8 June 1991, Historical Studies XVIII (Dublin, 1993), pp 13–27, at p. 20. 8 Smith, Reg. Fleming, pp 166–7 (no. 170); see Katharine Simms, ‘The archbishops of Armagh and the O’Neills, 1347– 1461’, IHS, 19 (1974), 38–55: 43, and above, p. 103 9 Above, p. 90 10 AI, pp 388–9. 11 Katharine Simms, ‘Propaganda use of the Táin in the later Middle Ages’, Celtica, 15 (1983),

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Connor in 1315, which resulted in the captivity of William de Burgh, lord of Mayo, and left the earl himself ‘without sway or power, during this year’.12 Áed O’Donnell, king of Tír Conaill, invaded Sligo, where the earl had recently acquired the former Fitzgerald lordship of Sligo, and had allowed a branch of the O’Conor dynasty, whose leaders would later be known as O’Conor Sligo (Ó Conchobair Sligig), forcibly to eject the Fitzgeralds’ protégés, the Clan Murtagh O’Conors (Clann Muirchertaig Uí Chonchobair). O’Donnell was temporarily successful in forcing one of the O’Conors of the Sligo branch to recognize his overlordship of the barony of Carbury in north Sligo, only to have his plans frustrated by his own wife, a princess of the Clan Murtagh O’Conors, who hired a band of galloglasses to assassinate her husband’s new vassal in pursuance of her family’s feud.13 In the same period, O’Donnell demonstrated his complete independence of the Bruce alliance by killing O’Neill’s eldest son Seaán, and a MacDonald chief from the Western Isles, at Derry in 1318. The conflict here most probably arose from competing claims to take over the defeated earl’s newly acquired estates in Inishowen and the port of Derry, territory coveted by the O’Donnell kings throughout the preceding century.14 In Connacht the current leader of the Clan Murtagh O’Conors had offered to ally with Bruce to recover his family’s former claim to the Connacht kingship, but he ignored Bruce’s stipulation that he should wage war with the AngloNorman colonists only. Instead he attacked and was eventually defeated by the reigning ‘king of Connacht’, Feilim O’Conor. The latter then formed an antiEnglish alliance with the chieftains Tadc O’Kelly (Ó Cellaig) of east Galway and O’Melaghlin (Ó Máelsechlainn) of West Meath before being defeated at the Battle of Athenry by William de Burgh, lord of Mayo, newly returned from Scottish captivity in 1316.15 A poem sequence, apparently addressed to this Tadc O’Kelly before his defeat and death at the Battle of Athenry, vaunts his warlike intention to burn down not only the de Burgh stronghold of Loughrea, but Galway town, Dublin, Limerick and Waterford, to rid all Ireland of the ‘stuttering English’, but includes no mention of Bruce or the Scots.16 In Thomond (county Clare) as in Connacht, it was the losing side in the local dynastic feud, the Clann Briain Ruaid O’Briens, who sided with Bruce. Interestingly the O’Brien family saga, Caithréim Thoirdhealbhaigh, in recounting the near-annihilation of Clann Briain Ruaid by their rival kinsmen the Clann 142–9: 144–6. 12 ALC 1, pp 578–9; Ann. Conn., pp 240–1. 13 Ann. Conn., pp 240–3; Katharine Simms, ‘A lost tribe – the Clan Murtagh O’Conors’, Galway Archaeological and Historical Society Journal, 53 (2001), 1–22: 7–13. See below, pp 442–3. 14 Ann. Conn., pp 252– 3; Simms, ‘Tír Eoghain “North of the Mountain”’, pp 163–4. 15 Orpen, Normans, 4, p. 182 [525–6]; Simms, ‘A lost tribe’, 11–13. 16 ‘Tadc triath ós cáich’, ABM, no. 447, pp 626–7. The verses are probably a youthful work of Seaán Mór Ó Dubagáin (d.1372), to whom is ascribed a companion piece to the same Tadc, immediately preceding this in the same manuscript ‘Tairngertaid tren toghbaltach’, ibid., no. 453, p. 633.

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Taidc at the Battle of Corcumroe in 1317, echoes the Bruce propaganda letters to the Irish leaders, which had called for pan-Celtic unity against English tyranny. The author puts the same sentiments into the mouth of the Clann Briain leader, rallying his troops before the battle: To universal Gaeldom this story shall be a tale of woeful import, and this encounter is big with sorrow for the Erinachs; seeing that for the freeborn clans of Brian’s seed … to come to one place for unsparing mutual destruction, is merely to give the pale English charter and conveyance of all the countries of the Gael.17 This statement, occurring in a text now generally accepted as a mid-fourteenthcentury composition,18 may lend a little more credence to the Latin text of doubtful provenance19 purporting to be a letter from Domnall O’Neill to an unknown ‘finnen MacCarath’ (MacCarthy?) in the south of Ireland, urging him to support Edward Bruce in very similar terms: the sacrilegious and accursed English … by foxlike fraud and deceit promote their own interests by disseminating quarrels and intestine feuds among us so that we being weakened by wounding one another, may easily yield ourselves a prey to them.20 The rhetoric could well be an eighteenth-century pastiche, but it is quite appropriate to Domnall’s own circumstances, with his kingship constantly threatened by the Clann Áeda Buide O’Neills and their Anglo-Irish supporters. Although the three-year campaign of Edward Bruce ended ignominiously with his defeat and death at Faughart in 1318, the war had impacted Gaelic Irish leaders in every part of Ireland simultaneously, with Domnall O’Neill playing a leading role through his initial invitation to Bruce to extend his Scottish war of independence into Ireland. We have direct documentary evidence from this period not only of O’Neill’s claim to be provincial king of all Ulster, but that he maintained he had a hereditary right to rule all Ireland, as son of Brian of the Battle of Down, ‘king of the kings of Ireland’, and a descendant of the long line of Uí Néill kings who had claimed to rule all Ireland from Tara in an unbroken sequence from pre-Christian times. As the unquestioned heir to the kingship of Ireland, he argued, he had a perfect legal right to pass on his title to Edward 17 O’Grady, Caithréim, 2, p. 90. 18 L.F. MacNamara, ‘An examination of the medieval Irish text Caithréim Thoirdhealbhaigh’, North Munster Antiquarian Journal, 8 (1961), 182–92; Aoife Nic Ghiollamhaith, ‘Dynastic warfare and historical writing in north Munster, 1276–1350’, CMCS, 2 (Winter 1981), 73–89: 76. 19 Diarmuid Ó Murchadha, ‘Is the O’Neill-MacCarthy letter of 1317 a forgery?’, IHS, 23 (1982), 61–7. 20 Ibid., 67; Herbert Wood, ‘Letter from Domnall O Neill to Fineen MacCarthy, 1317’, PRIA, 37C (1924–7), 141–8: 144.

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Bruce. This was to be the last practical attempt by a Gaelic chief to make the concept of the high-kingship of Ireland a reality. The death, destruction and famine that accompanied its failure did not encourage any repetition of the project, although the Anglo-Irish colony had been seriously weakened in the course of the war.

T H E D E M A N D E V I L L E R E V O LT A N D M U R D E R O F E A R L W I L L I A M D E B U RG H

In 1319, following on Edward Bruce’s defeat, the de Mandevilles and the Clann Áeda Buide invaded Tír Eógain and temporarily expelled King Domnall, killing one of his sons in the fighting, and installing Henry son of Brian II O’Neill of the Clann Áeda Buide as king in his place.21 Domnall is said to have recovered his kingship subsequently, but the fact that when he eventually died in 1325 it was in the crannóg of Loch Láegaire, on the western borders of Tír Eógain, suggests he may have recovered only the western part of his territory. Some years later, in 1333, Anglo-Norman records show the kingdom of Tír Eógain divided between Henry O’Neill, and Domnall’s surviving son and heir, Áed Remor (‘Á. the Fat’).22 Somewhat surprisingly, the Anglo-Irish themselves appear to have been attracted to the ‘federal’ political model whereby Edward Bruce was styled king of all Ireland, and Domnall Ó Néill was to hold the province of Ulster under him as a vassal king. The old ‘Red Earl’ of Ulster, Richard de Burgh, died in June 1326. In July of the same year, three of his sons-in-law, Thomas fitz John Fitzgerald, earl of Kildare, John de Bermingham, earl of Louth, and Maurice fitz  Thomas Fitzgerald, the future earl of Desmond, met with William de Bermingham, lord of Tethmoy, Brian Bán (‘B. the White- or Fair-haired’) O’Brien, leader of the defeated Clann Briain Ruaid O’Briens, and certain other nobles at Kilkenny, where they are alleged to have conspired to rebel against the English king (Edward II, who was shortly to be deposed in any case), planning to crown Maurice fitz Thomas of Desmond king of Ireland, and to share out the country between them.23 Nothing came of these alleged schemes at the time, but 21 AFM 3, pp 522–3. Robin Frame, English lordship in Ireland, 1318–1361 (Oxford, 1982), pp 133–4, queries whether Richard de Burgh himself took part in this expedition. 22 Simms, ‘Late medieval Tír Eoghain’, p. 144; G.H. Orpen, ‘The earldom of Ulster, parts I–IV’, JRSAI, 43 (1913), Pt I, 30–46; Pt II, 133–43; Pt III, 44 (1914), 51–66; Pt IV, 45 (1915), 123– 42, see Pt IV, 141. In 1335 both Henry O’Neill and ‘Irewere Oneel de Ulvester’ (Aed Remor O’Neill of Ulster) were summoned to render aid to Edward III’s war against the Scots (Ranald Nicholson, ‘An Irish expedition to Scotland in 1335’, IHS, 13 (1962–3), 197–211: 202, note 5). 23 G.O. Sayles, ‘The rebellious first earl of Desmond’ in J.A. Watt, J.B. Morrall and F.X. Martin (eds), Medieval studies presented to Aubrey Gwynn, SJ (Dublin, 1961), pp 203–29, at p. 206; idem, ‘The legal proceedings against the first earl of Desmond’, Anal. Hib., 23 (1966),

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the next year open war broke out among the aristocrats of southern Ireland, with Maurice fitz Thomas and his ally Brian Bán O’Brien ravaging the lands of Arnold le Poer, seneschal of Kilkenny, who was allied to the leaderless de Burgh faction. To stabilize matters Earl Roger Mortimer, acting as regent for the boy king Edward III, had Richard de Burgh’s grandson William, who was to be known as the ‘Brown Earl’ of Ulster, declared of age in October 1327, knighted and put in possession of his vast lands (see Fig. 14). The young earl arrived in Ireland in the autumn of 1328, escorted there by his uncle by marriage, King Robert the Bruce, celebrating the short-lived period of Anglo-Scottish friendship that followed the ‘Treaty of Edinburgh’. The justiciar then brokered a peace between the Fitzgeralds and de Burghs in July 1329, but disturbances soon broke out again, chiefly because of Desmond’s association with Brian Bán O’Brien, then ravaging lands of the Butlers and de Burghs in south Tipperary. In 1331 we are told there was a renewed conspiracy to crown Maurice fitz Thomas, now earl of Desmond, as king of Ireland. This time it involved two mainstays of de Burgh control in Connacht and Ulster, and was clearly indicative of a revolt by his own vassals against the young ‘Brown Earl’. As ‘high-king’, Maurice fitz Thomas of Desmond was supposed to rule Munster and Meath directly, William de Bermingham was to reign in Leinster, Walter de Burgh, lord of Mayo, was to have the province of Connacht, and Sir Henry de Mandeville the younger was to obtain the province of Ulster.24 Whatever the truth of these accusations, the young earl of Ulster clearly believed them. He imprisoned Walter de Burgh in the castle of Northburgh in Inishowen, where he died, and chased Sir Henry de Mandeville out of the earldom and down to Dublin, where he was arrested and held prisoner in Dublin Castle. William de Bermingham and his son, and the earl of Desmond were similarly arrested at this time. De Bermingham was later executed, but Desmond was freed eighteen months later on guarantees of good conduct. The plot for a countrywide revolt may have come to nothing, but the ‘Brown Earl’s’ cadet cousins, the de Burghs or Burkes of Mayo, and the de Mandevilles in Ulster were thirsting for revenge. The two families were linked by the marriage of Walter de Burgh’s sister Gyle to Sir Richard de Mandeville. On 6 June 1333 Robert de Mandeville and John Logan assassinated Earl William de Burgh as he was on his way to church in Carrickfergus. The widowed countess fled back to England with the earl’s baby daughter and heiress, Elizabeth de Burgh, while the de Mandevilles and their co-conspirators called on their ally, Henry O’Neill, and the other Irish to rise to war in support of their cause.25 The contemporary chronicler, Friar John Clyn of Kilkenny, commented: 1–47: 6. 24  Sayles, ‘The legal proceedings’, pp 12–14; Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 244–50. 25 Orpen, Normans, 4, pp 227–49 [548–59]; Gilbert, Chart. St Mary’s, 2, pp 367– 79; Bernadette Williams (ed.), The Annals of Ireland by Friar John Clyn (Dublin, 2007), pp 206–11.

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The fourteenth century: absenteeism and Gaelic recovery Succession to the earldom of Ulster

Hugh I de Lacy Lord of Meath (d.1186)

Walter de Lacy Lord of Meath (d.1241)

Hugh II de Lacy the Younger 1st earl of Ulster (d.1242)

Egidia m. Richard I de Burgh Lord of Connacht (d.1242)

Walter de Burgh 2nd earl of Ulster & lord of Connacht (d.1271)

William Óc de Burgh (d.1270) Sir William Líath de Burgh (d.1324)

Richard ‘the Red Earl’ 3rd earl of Ulster & lord of Connacht (d.1326)

Walter (d.1332)

John (d.1313) m. Elizabeth de Clare

Edmund Albanach (d.1375)

(the de Burgh lords of Mayo)

Ulick (d.1353)

Gyle m. Richard de Mandeville

(the de Burgh lords of Clanrickard, approx. Co. Galway)

William ‘the Brown Earl’ 4th earl of Ulster (d.1333) m. Matilda of Lancaster

Elizabeth m. Lionel duke of Clarence 5th earl of Ulster (d.1368)

Philippa m. Edmund Mortimer, 3rd earl of March 6th earl of Ulster & lord of Trim (d.1381)

Roger Mortimer 4th earl of March 7th earl of Ulster & lord of Trim (d.1398)

Edmund Mortimer 5th earl of March, 8th earl of Ulster & lord of Trim (d.1425)

Anne m. Richard duke of Cambridge (d.1415)

Richard duke of York & 9th earl of Ulster (d.1460) Edward IV, king of England, earl of March and Ulster (d.1483) (earldom became crown property thenceforward)

Fig. 14 Selective genealogy illustrating succession to the earldom of Ulster. Earls in boldface, nicknames in italics.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages This evil, as usual, was said to be committed by reason of a woman, namely Gyle de Burgh, wife of lord Richard de Mandeville, because [Earl William] imprisoned her brother Walter de Burgh and others.26

Friar Clyn’s comment has been seen as the typical misogynistic view of a clerical writer in the Middle Ages, blaming all women from Eve onwards for leading men astray, and he cannot be acquitted of responsibility for the interjection ‘as usual’. Nevertheless, it is on record that the widowed countess Matilda proclaimed a reward of 100 marks to anyone who could capture Richard de Mandeville and Gyle, his wife, ‘dead or alive’,27 confirming that she saw Gyle as complicit in her husband’s murder. The outlawed Richard de Mandeville was heard of again in 1337, invading the Isle of Man with a multitude of Scottish felons.28 Ten years earlier, when Sir Richard de Mandeville had held the responsible post of constable of the castle of Carrickfergus, he was given custody of Brian, the son and heir of King Henry O’Neill of the Clann Áeda Buide, to hold as hostage for his father’s loyalty.29 It is tempting to speculate that when Richard de Mandeville fled to join the fleets of Scottish pirates, he brought the young Brian with him. Years later, a bardic poem addressed to Brian son of Henry O’Neill in support of his claim to kingship refers to his men having made long voyages, to the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, staying so long at sea that birds have nested in his ships. Brian’s boat, he sings, must have been fashioned from the wood of Noah’s Ark.30

P R O V I N C I A L K I N G S H I P O F T H E G R E AT O ’ N E I L L O F T Í R E Ó G A I N

The English administration held a series of inquisitions in 1333 to survey and value the vast possessions of the murdered Earl, now being taken into royal wardship, since the earl’s heiress was a one-year-old infant. Juries of local landowners gave evidence of the extent of the de Burgh estates in different regions of Ireland and Britain, and in Ulster these stated that the services of the Irish chiefs there used to be worth £355 annually, but were worth nothing now, because all the Irish were in a state of war. They list the chiefs as: Ruaidri O’Cahan, ‘king’ (rex) of Fir na Craíbe in north Derry, Henry and Áed O’Neill, ‘Irishmen’, who between them held the land of Tír Eógain, Ruaidri Maguire, ‘king’ of Fir Manach (Fermanagh), Seaán and Áed MacMahon, ‘Irishmen’, who between them held the kingdom of the Irish of Airgialla (county Monaghan), Domnall O’Hanlon, ‘king’ of Airthir in the modern county Armagh, Seaán MacCartan, ‘king’ of Uí Echach (barony of Iveagh, south county Down), Robert 26 Williams, The Annals of Ireland by Friar John Clyn, p. 210. 27 Cal. close rolls, 1337–9, p. 170. 28 Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 42, no. 7 (Rot. Pat. 11 Edw. III). 29 Ibid., p. 36, no. 96. 30 ‘An ullamh fós Feis Teamhrach?’ in ABM, no. 46, p. 47, verses 9–11.

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and Cathbarr MacGilmore who between them held the land of ‘Oly’ in north Down, and Magnus O’Flynn, Irishman, ‘king’ of the Irish of Tuirtre (south Antrim and south-east Derry). All are described as holding their lands by the service of maintaining various fixed numbers of mercenary soldiers, billeted on them by the earl of Ulster, to be sent fully equipped whenever summoned to the earl’s army. However more details emerged when a second valuation of the earl’s Ulster possessions, as they were on the day he died, was taken in 1342, with a view to compensating the earl’s widow for the value of dowerlands in Ulster that she dared not enter, and so could not profit from. Here the list of the earl’s vassal chieftains contains three more names, O’Donnell, O’Reilly and O’Gormley, and it is stated that Henry O’Neill, though he only maintained half the quota of mercenaries due from Tír Eógain, paid the earl annually the sum of 300 cows ‘to have the whole lordship of Tír Eógain and for Áed O’Neill’. Besides Henry O’Neill, O’Donnell, O’Gormley, Maguire, MacCartan, the two MacGilmores, O’Flynn and O’Cahan are also said to have paid varying numbers of cows as an annual tribute31 in addition to their service of maintaining mercenaries (satellites). The satellites themselves are said to have each received one mark (2/3 of a pound) annually for their upkeep, and one additional mark for their wages, paid to them by the Irish chiefs in peacetime, although the earl paid the soldiers’ wages and expenses when they joined his army on campaigns. In spite of these additional dues, the value of the Irish services on the day of the earl’s death is given as something over £100 a year, rather than the £355 the earl was officially due.32 Clearly not all the Irish were rendering the services they owed at that time, and there are other signs of a decline in the extent and power of the Ulster earldom, dating back to the later years of Earl Richard de Burgh. In 1322 the old ‘Red Earl’ seems to have abandoned his earlier plans to develop the port of Derry, when he leased half the ecclesiastical city back to its original owner, the bishop of Raphoe.33 The report of an official in 1327, during the minority of his grandson and heir, William, states ‘the late Earl was so feeble for a long time before he died that his lordship [in Ulster] and elsewhere has greatly declined’.34 In the 1333 inquisitions, some manors in Antrim and Down are said to have lain waste since the Bruce wars, and the colonies lying west of the Bann were described as of no value because of the war being waged by the earl’s murderers 31 O’Hanlon and MacMahon were said to owe annual payments for their territories to the de Verdon lordship in Meath – A.J. Otway-Ruthven, ‘The partition of the de Verdon lands in Ireland’, PRIA, 66C (1968), 401–55: 406, 422, 428, 433. 32 Orpen, ‘The earldom of Ulster, Pt IV’, p. 141; Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., p. 216; London, Public Record Office: Chancery Miscellanea C 47/10/20/14. The expression ‘the whole lordship of Tír Eoghain’ did not apparently include O’Cahan’s land of Fir na Craoibhe, which according to the same source was charged a separate rent of eighty cows a year. 33 Robin Frame, ‘A register of lost deeds relating to the earldom of Ulster, c.1230–1376’ in Seán Duffy (ed.), Princes, prelates and poets in medieval Ireland: essays in honour of Katharine Simms (Dublin, 2013), pp 85–106, at p. 96, item no. 37. 34 G.O. Sayles (ed.), Documents on the affairs of Ireland before the king’s council

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and their Irish allies.35 By 1342 O’Donnell’s vassal-chief, Domnall O’Doherty, was described in the annal-entry on his death as lord of almost all the peninsula of Inishowen.36 (See Plate VII) The rebellion of Henry O’Neill and the other Ulster Irish ended in 1338 with a parley between the Irish and the Ulster colonists presided over by the justiciar, John de Charleton. In return for hostages to guarantee his future loyalty, the leader of Clann Áeda Buide was granted a large area of war-wasted land within the earldom, at a rent of 100 cows a year.37 Presumably this land lay in southern Antrim, not only because the Clann Áeda Buide, or ‘O’Neills of Clandeboy’ (this became the new name of the territory they occupied), are found here in later centuries, but because over the next decade or so two O’Flynn princes of Uí Thuirtre in south Antrim were slain by members of the Clandeboy O’Neills, and after the death in 1368 of Tomás O’Flynn, king of Uí Thuirtre, no further king from that dynasty is recorded in the annals, although the O’Flynns feature as allies of the Clandeboy O’Neills in the fifteenth century.38 As Henry O’Neill expanded eastwards, his cousin and rival Áed Remor son of Domnall O’Neill was active in the south and west. In 1337, he concluded a treaty with the inhabitants of Fir Manach and Airgialla. In 1339 he invaded Tír Conaill with an O’Donnell prince in his train, but was defeated by O’Doherty, the new lord of Inishowen.39 The powerful Áed O’Donnell, who had used the disruption of the Bruce invasion to expand his own borders, had died in 1333 after a reign of fifty-two years, praised in the annals as king of both Tír Conaill and Fir Manach, overlord of the districts of Cairbre (in north county Sligo) and Breifne (Leitrim and Cavan), a potential king of all Ulster, while the tradition most favourable to the O’Donnell dynasty, as recorded in the Annals of the Four Masters, calls him lord also of O’Gormley’s border territory of Cenél Múáin, and of the peninsula of Inishowen, which was being recaptured from the AngloIrish settlers by his vassal O’Doherty.40 His son and successor, Conchobar O’Donnell (d.1342), is also described by the Four Masters as ruler of the Cenél Conaill, of north Connacht, Fir Manach, Cenél Múáin and Inishowen. However Conchobar’s rule was challenged by ambitious half-brothers, and it would appear that Áed Remor O’Neill, who had already formed his own links with the kingdom of Fir Manach, was anxious to replace Conchobar with another member of the O’Donnell family who might either hand back the disputed territories of Cenél Múáin and Inishowen, or acknowledge himself a vassal of O’Neill. In 1343, O’Neill seemed to attain this goal. King Conchobar O’Donnell had been slain in the preceding year by a half-brother, Niall Garb (‘N. the rough’ or (Dublin, 1979), p. 128. 35 Orpen, ‘The earldom of Ulster, Pt II’, p. 141; – ‘Pt III’, p. 63; – ‘Pt IV’, pp 127–8. 36  AU 2, pp 470–1 (AD1342). 37  Cal. close rolls, 1337–9, p. 329. 38 AFM 3, pp 586–7; AU 2, pp 508–9; Katharine Simms, ‘“The king’s friend” – O’Neill, the crown and the earldom of Ulster’ in Eng. & Ire., ed. Lydon, pp 214–36, at p. 225. 39 AU 2, pp 456–61; Ann. Clonm., p. 291. 40 Ann. Conn., pp 272–3; AFM 3, pp 552–3. For Tír

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‘the rugged’). Conchobar’s son Áengus then appealed for help to Áed O’Neill, and in 1343 the Tír Conaill sub-chiefs O’Doherty and Domnall O’Boyle (Ó Baigill) joined with Áed O’Neill and the MacSweeney galloglasses to depose Niall Garb and install Áengus O’Donnell as king of Tír Conaill. It is true that Niall Garb tried to recover power immediately afterwards, and Áengus was rescued a second time not by O’Neill, but by his mother’s kin the Clan Murtagh O’Conors, but the O’Donnell dynasty continued thereafter to be crippled with succession disputes until 1380, and were in no position to challenge Áed O’Neill’s growing power.41 (See above Fig. 11) Developments elsewhere in Ireland were also to favour the rise of Áed Remor O’Neill. English lordship in Ireland was in decline both territorially and financially. The original Anglo-Norman settlement of Ireland had taken place against the background of a population boom in western Europe from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. This led to buoyant prices for agricultural produce and a movement to clear and cultivate marginal lands in hills, forests and marshes, together with an expansion from the heavily populated central regions outwards to colonize the Slavonic territories and Palestine in the east, and Wales, Ireland and lowland Scotland in the west. This demographic expansion had already begun to level off by the late thirteenth century, and bad weather and poor harvests in the first half of the fourteenth century had led to famines, a drop in population and a decline in the market for agricultural produce even before these trends were greatly accentuated by the European-wide plague known as the Black Death of 1347–9.42 The decline in the profitability of landed estates, combined with the growing expense of defending lands which bordered territories still ruled by the increasingly militant Irish chieftains, persuaded many of the more prominent English nobles who held land in Ireland to withdraw from them. They either became permanently ‘absentee landlords’, or sold or transferred their Irish estates to lords still resident in Ireland, such as the Fitzgerald and Butler families.43 As a result, by the mid-fourteenth century there was a lack of courtiers at Westminster who were actively involved in Ireland, and this, combined with Edward III’s dissatisfaction at the dramatic fall in revenues from his Irish lordship, led to suspicions of Anglo-Irish embezzlement on the part of the Conaill claims to overlordship of north Connacht, Cenél Múáin and Inishowen, see Katharine Simms, ‘Late medieval Donegal’ in Donegal Hist. & Soc., pp 183–201, at pp 183–6. 41 On the intricacies of the O’Donnell succession disputes see Simms, ‘A lost tribe’, pp 13–17. On the role of the MacSweeney galloglasses in these events, see Katharine Simms, ‘Images of the galloglass in poems to the MacSweeneys’ in Seán Duffy (ed.), The world of the galloglass: kings, warlords and warriors in Ireland and Scotland, 1200–1600 (Dublin, 2007), pp 106–23, at p. 109. 42 A.R. Bridbury, ‘Before the Black Death’, Economic History Review, 30 (1977), 393–410: 407– 10; T.B. Barry, The archaeology of medieval Ireland (London and New York, 1987), pp 168–80. 43 Frame, English lordship in Ireland, pp 52–74, 334; R.R. Davies, The first English empire: power and identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343 (Oxford, 2000), pp 178–82.

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English government and a corresponding resentment on the part of the AngloIrish community leaders, whether these were aristocrats, crown officials or town councils. In 1341–2 this resentment erupted into a crisis, when the English king revoked all royal grants made in Ireland since the accession of his father in 1307, with the intention of returning only those made for ‘good, just and reasonable causes’, and declared he would in future appoint only officials born in England and holding English property to administer his lordship of Ireland. After a united protest by the colonists, including the troublesome first earl of Desmond, the draconian revocation was partly abandoned, with reservations about grants made in Edward III’s own reign that could be shown to have been obtained unjustly, very probably a reference to the régime of the hated Roger Mortimer while Edward III was still underage. As a major holder of Irish estates himself, Mortimer favoured the Anglo-Irish magnates, especially the first earl of Kildare, and the earldoms of Ormond and Desmond were conferred on the heads of the Butler family of Ormond and Maurice fitz Thomas head of the Desmond Geraldines in 1328 and 1329 respectively while Mortimer dominated the English government in the name of the young Edward III.44 Sir Ralph D’Ufford, the new justiciar coming to Ireland in July 1344, was among those who felt most suspicious of the Anglo-Irish nobility, since he was the doting second husband of the Countess Matilda, widow of the murdered earl of Ulster. Apparently he resented Henry O’Neill of the Clann Áeda Buide as partaking in the guilt of the earl’s Anglo-Irish assassins. In the following February he brought a royal expedition northwards to reassert control over the Ulster earldom, potentially an important part of his step-daughter’s inheritance. By exercising the old prerogative of the Ulster earls, he deposed Henry O’Neill, ‘king of Ulster’, and gave the title instead to Áed Remor O’Neill, after taking Áed’s son Conchobar as a hostage to guarantee his loyalty.45 D’Ufford also announced his intention to reimpose the earl of Ulster’s custom of billeting a quota of mercenary soldiers on each vassal king in the province, the prerogative known as the ‘bonaght of Ulster’ (so called from the Irish buannacht, signifying the billeting of mercenaries, or buannaide).46 However there is no evidence that  this plan was carried out and instead, by 1350, it seems that Stephen MacQuillin (or ‘Mac Uigilin’), the last commander of the ‘Brown Earl’ of Ulster’s mercenaries, was now fighting for Áed Remor O’Neill. In that year 44 Frame, Ireland and Britain, pp 113–29. David Beresford, ‘Mortimer, Roger (1287–1330)’ in DIB, 6, pp 708–9. 45 Frame, Ireland and Britain, p. 143; Williams, The Annals of Ireland by Friar John Clyn, pp 230–1; Robin Frame, ‘The justiciarship of Ralph Ufford: warfare and politics in fourteenth-century Ireland’, Studia Hibernica, 13 (1973), 7–47: 25. The fragmentary ‘Annals of Lecan’ describe Henry O’Neill as rí cóigeadh Uladh, ‘king of the province of Ulster’, in his death-notice under the year 1347 – Kenneth Nicholls, ‘Introduction, with appendix: additional marginalia from TCD MS 1301 (H.2.11)’, unpaginated, prefixed to AFM 1. 46 Cal. pat. rolls, 1343–5, p. 239; see C.A. Empey and Katharine Simms, ‘The ordinances of the White Earl and the problem of coign in the later Middle Ages’, PRIA, 75C

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O’Neill, MacQuillin and MacMahon of Airgialla jointly burned the villages of Louth and Castlering and were threatening to destroy the whole county of Louth.47 By 1390, the record shows it was O’Neill who imposed ‘the bonaght of Ulster’ on the other Irish chiefs in the province, though the troops he billeted out were no longer MacQuillin’s followers, but galloglasses under the command of the Clan Alexander MacDonald from the Western Isles of Scotland.48 Áed O’Neill’s enmity against the citizens of Louth in 1350 was most probably provoked by their continued support for Henry O’Neill (d.1347), and for his son Brian, the next chief of Clandeboy (d.1369), who were still fighting to recover power over Tír Eógain.49 Whether D’Ufford intended it or not, his act of deposing Henry O’Neill, without expelling him from the Clandeboy O’Neills’ newly acquired territory inside the earldom of Ulster, had provided the AngloIrish colony in Ulster with a buffer state in south Antrim, friendly to the colonists and opposed to Áed Remor. Robin Frame has remarked that ‘the taking of a lordship into the king’s hand was frequently the signal for its collapse’.50 The earldom of Ulster from the time of the ‘Brown Earl’s murder in 1333 had no resident lord, being first administered by royal officials on behalf of the infant heiress, Elizabeth de Burgh, and then through the marriage of Elizabeth passing into the possession of Edward III’s third son, Lionel of Clarence. Prince Lionel, after a somewhat ineffective term as lord lieutenant of Ireland (1361–6), died young in 1367, leaving an infant daughter Philippa. Her lands, including the earldom of Ulster, were again administered by royal officials, until they passed by Philippa’s marriage to Edmund Mortimer, earl of March and Ulster, another non-resident lord. The Mortimers, whose extensive claims to lands in Ireland included the liberty of Trim in Meath, as well as the de Burgh inheritance in Connacht and Ulster, were not only absentees, but the family were dogged by a succession of early deaths, leaving underage heirs, at which times the earldom of Ulster became once more the responsibility of royal administrators.51 (See above, Fig. 14) The military defence of the earldom rested initially on the capable shoulders of Sir Robert Savage of county Down, seneschal of Ulster from 1334 until at least 1352.52 In announcing his death in 1360, the contemporary Dublin annals recalled a great battle he had fought near Antrim, in which they said his army (1975), 161–87: 180, 183. 47 P.M. Connolly, Irish exchequer payments, 1270–1446 (2 vols, Dublin, 1998), 2, p. 435. On the ‘bonaght of Ulster’, and MacQuillin’s role in it see Simms, ‘Gaelic warfare’, pp 108–10; Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 138–9; Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., p. 216. 48 Simms, ‘Gaelic warfare’, pp 108–10; G.A. Hayes-McCoy, Scots mercenary forces in Ireland (1565–1603), p. 26; below, pp 128–30, 140, 142. 49 Simms, ‘Late medieval Tír Eoghain’, pp 145–6. 50 Frame, Ireland and Britain, p. 249. 51 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 285–95, 313–15. 52 Rot. Canc. Hib., pp 38, no. 56; 45, no. 56; Cal. pat. rolls, 1338–40, p. 403; Cal. close rolls, 1349–54, p. 442. On Robert Savage see Katharine Simms, ‘The Ulster revolt of 1404 – an anti-Lancastrian dimension?’ in Brendan Smith (ed.), Ireland and the English world in the late Middle Ages (Basingstoke and New York, 2009), pp 141–60, at p. 143.

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slew 3,000 Irish, probably an incident during the de Mandeville rebellion 1333–8, which had eventually resulted in the Clandeboy O’Neills occupying the south Antrim area. An earlier entry for 1352, however, blamed Sir Robert and his son Henry Savage for not fortifying the earldom’s borders against the Irish. Sir Henry was credited with the saying ‘I had rather have a castle of bones than of stones’, that is, he would rely on brave men for his defence, rather than on buildings, a foolish decision according to the Dublin chronicler.53 It is worth noting that Sir Robert Savage was buried in the Dominican Friary in Coleraine. Account rolls for that area between the years 1353 and 1360 survive for the dower lands of the ‘Brown Earl’s’ widowed mother, Elizabeth de Clare, demonstrating that her estates in north Antrim were still in Anglo-Irish hands and yielding a modest profit.54 One could argue that the absence of a resident lord in the earldom of Ulster afforded Áed Remor O’Neill the same opportunities for territorial expansion that had tempted his grandfather, Brian ‘of the Battle of Down’, to aspire to highkingship during the vacancy in the earldom from 1242 to 1263 after the death of Earl Hugh de Lacy. However Áed’s aspirations were more pragmatic. His conflicts with the colonists arose from their alliance with the Clandeboy O’Neills, and were interrupted by a series of truces.55 The main focus of his ambition was to exercise the kind of authority over the other northern Irish chieftains that had once been wielded by the MacLaughlin kings, or even the de Burgh earls. In 1355 he invaded Tír Conaill once more, plundered the inhabitants’ cattle and received their hostages in token of submission. Three years later he inflicted a great defeat on the combined forces of Fir Manach and Airgialla (Fermanagh and Monaghan).56 In support of the new O’Neill title of rí Ulad, Áed Remor had a seal made using the Red Hand crest, a symbol also found in the earl of Ulster’s coat-of-arms. It bore the inscription S. ODONIS ONEILL REGIS HYBERNICORUM ULTONIE (‘the seal of Áed O’Neill, king of the Irish of Ulster’).57 (See Fig. 15) Another public relations gesture may be implied in the sixteenth-century tradition that Áed built sixty houses beside his own mansion at Fraochmag (near Augher?) in which to entertain and reward poets and lesser men of art from all 53 Gilbert, Chart. St Mary’s, 2, pp 391–4; Ann. Grace, p. 144. The mid-fourteenth century is generally seen as a time when few castles were erected in Ireland, perhaps for economic reasons, though recent research suggests some of the tower houses typical of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries may have originated as early as the fourteenth. See Barry, ‘Rural settlement in medieval Ireland’, pp 113, 119. 54 McNeill, Anglo-Norman Ulster, pp 91–2, 118, 136–47. 55 Cal. pat. rolls, 1350–4, p. 148; Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 62, no. 100; Smith, Reg. Swetemen, p. 230. See Simms, ‘Late medieval Tír Eoghain’, pp 145–6. 56 Ann. Conn., pp 316–17; AU 2, p. 506 (where the editor’s reading ‘d’Aodh mor mac Toirdelbaig’ should be rather ‘dAed mor mc doñ mc …’). 57 William Reeves, ‘The seal of Hugh O’Neill’, UJA, 1st ser., 1 (1853), 255–8; see Simms, ‘Propaganda use of the Táin’; Freya Verstraten, ‘Images of Gaelic lordship in Ireland, c.1200–c.1400’ in Linda Doran and James Lyttleton (eds), Lordship in medieval Ireland: image

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over Ireland.58 This is not as implausible as it seems. In 1351 William O’Kelly, chief of Uí Maine in east Galway, had departed from tradition by being the first secular lord to issue a ‘school invitation’ to the poets of Ireland in  general, and housed them during the Christmas festivities in serried rows of temporary huts erected beside his newly-built castle.59 If Áed Remor had followed O’Kelly’s example and issued an Ireland-wide invitation to poets, this may have been the occasion for an address to Áed by the Munster ollam or Fig. 15 Engraving of the seal of master-poet, Máelmuire bacach (‘M. the Áed O’Neill, UJA, 1st ser., 1 (1853), 255. lame’) Mág Raith (Magrath). This poem, ‘Ní triall corrach as cóir dh’Aodh’,60 describes the king making elaborate preparations to march against the English by summoning a great hosting of his subject territories, who are listed as the men of Fir Manach, Tír Conaill, O’Cahan’s lordship (north Derry), the Irish of eastern Ulster, Airthir (south Armagh) and Airgialla (Monaghan area), in other words, the whole province of Ulster outside the Anglo-Irish settlements. The effusiveness of the annals when recording his death under the year 1364 suggests that Áed Remor had indeed practised widespread generosity towards the learned classes. They style Áed ‘king of Ulster, the best king of any province in his tyme that liued’, ‘the best king that came from the northern half of Ireland in recent times into the high-kingship of the province of Ulster’ (in t-aen ri is ferr tainic do Leth Cuinn isin aimsir ndeighenaigh i n-airdrighi Coicidh Uladh’), and say he ‘died after good pennance as a good Christyan’.61 Áed Remor’s desire to rebuild a province-wide overlordship and, in effect, succeed to the authority over other Ulster chiefs that had once been wielded by the earls of Ulster, was by no means unique. It reflected a wider movement among fourteenth-century Gaelic Irish leaders to recover the lands and power their ancestors had lost as a result of the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman invasion. Seaán Mór O’Dugan (Ó Dubhagáin), the historian-poet employed by the O’Kelly dynasty of Uí Maine in east county Galway, had apparently addressed youthful verses to Tadc O’Kelly during the Bruce invasion, predicting that his patron would burn Galway, Dublin and Waterford, and expel the and reality (Dublin, 2007), pp 47–74, at pp 58–9. 58 Tadhg Ó Donnchadha (ed.), Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe (Dublin, 1931), p. 32. 59  Eleanor Knott, ‘Filidh Éireann go haointeach’, Ériu, 5 (1911), 163–87: 52–3. 60 ABM, pp 523–5, poem no. 375. 61 AU 2, pp 516–17 (I have given a more literal English translation than Mac Carthy’s); Ann. Clonm., p. 301. The sixteenth-century traditonal account in the Leabhar Eoghanach depicts an unnamed king of Connacht envying Áed’s numerous well-equipped warriors, and the lavishness of his hospitality – Ó Donnchadha, Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe, pp 32–3. See

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‘stuttering English’ from Ireland.62 He may well have been the moving spirit behind the unprecedented decision of his patron William O’Kelly to entertain all the poets of Ireland to a Christmas feast in 1351. In his later years he composed a long, learned poem, ‘Triallam timcheall na Fódla’ (‘Let us take a journey round Ireland’), in which his plan, never fully completed, was to enumerate each territorial unit in Ireland and name its ruling dynasty or dynasties, relying for most of his information, as he usually did, on the genealogical and place-name compilations inherited from the secularised church schools of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Where new Gaelic Irish families had replaced the twelfth-century dynasties, as in the case of the O’Donnells in Tír Conaill, the Maguires in Fir Manach and the MacMahons in Airgialla, he named both the ancient and the contemporary rulers, but he made no concessions to the claims of the Anglo-Norman newcomers. He was depicting an all-Gaelic Ireland, a blue-print for reconquest.63 Practical responses to such learned urgings to turn back the pages of history may be seen in the defiant inauguration in 1310 of the youthful Feilim O’Conor as king of Connacht ‘in the manner remembered by the old men and recorded in the old books’,64 or the decision of the diverse Gaelic chieftains of Leinster to elect Domnall mac Airt MacMurrough Kavanagh as their provincial king in the spring of 1328.65 One effect of the shrinkage of the English colony in Ireland was the absenteeism of the greatest landholders, who often neglected their duty to provide military defence in their frontier holdings, or transferred their estates to resident Anglo-Irish landowners. These local landowners might be more committed to exploiting their holdings, but were often less financially equipped to maintain, for example, garrisons in the large castles inherited from the thirteenth-century era. Another consequence was that, as the population of Western Europe in general shrank as a result of famines and the Black Death, more tempting farms and employment became available in England for AngloIrish peasants and artisans. Already feeling harassed by the local taxation and billeting of mercenary soldiers necessary to maintain the Irish ‘march’ or ‘frontier’ lands, uninvitingly known in those days as ‘the land of war’, the lower classes migrated back to England in substantial numbers during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, leaving the resident Anglo-Irish landlords with no alternative but to take in numbers of Gaelic Irish tenants, who were accused of collaborating with raids from their relatives, ‘the wild Irish’ (‘les irois sauvages’), below, pp 462–3. 62 Above, p. 113. 63 James Carney, Topographical poems by Seaán Mór Ó Dubhagáin and Giolla-na-Naomh Ó hUidhrín (Dublin, 1943), pp 11, 17 (text only); John O’Donovan (ed. and trans.), The topographical poems of John O’Dubhagain and Giolla na naomh O’Huidhrin (Dublin, 1862), pp 28–9, 40–1. On Seaán Mór Ó Dubagáin see Katharine Simms, ‘Ó Dubhagáin, Seán Mór (O’Dugan, John the Great, d.1372)’, Oxford DNB, 9, article no. 20562. 64 Ann. Conn., pp 222–3; Simms, ‘A lost tribe’, p. 11. 65 Gilbert, Chart. St Mary’s, 2, pp 365–6; Emmet O’Byrne, War, politics and the Irish of Leinster, 1156–1606 (Dublin, 2003),

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that is, those still living under the authority of their own chieftains. Chiefs like O’Neill, who used to hold their territories as tenants of some Anglo-Irish baron, or as crown tenants, no longer paid their annual tribute or rendered obedience to their nominal masters, and were rapidly becoming known as ‘the Irish enemies’.66 In some cases Anglo-Irish landlords made the best of a bad job by handing over deserted estates, including on occasion castles, which they no longer had the resources or interest to exploit, to a ‘friendly’ Irish leader who promised to pay rent, as the wasted lands of south Antrim were granted out to the Clann Áeda Buide or Clandeboy O’Neills. In other cases, the ‘wild Irish’ expanded aggressively, winning major battles in the field against the colonists, some of the most famous being the battle between the men of Louth and Brian MacMahon of Airgialla in 1346, in which 300 or 400 colonists are said to have been killed,67 or the battle in 1370, in which King Brian Sremach (‘B. the Blear-eyed’) O’Brien defeated Gerald Fitzgerald, the young 3rd earl of Desmond, and was able to hold him prisoner in his stronghold outside Ennis for over a year, while the town of Limerick itself was briefly garrisoned by O’Brien’s troops.68 A poem addressed to Áed’s son and eventual successor, Niall Mór (‘N. the Elder’) O’Neill (d.1397), expresses the surge of optimism generated by such military successes: Ireland is a woman who has recovered from terrible disasters … Having been the property of foreigners for a time, she now belongs to the Irish … Inis Fáil’s being held by a foreign army; lust for the possession of Banbha with the fair, rich grass; pillaging in every part of Ireland – these have been the cause of Ireland’s woe. Fair-complexioned Niall of Tara beholds angelic Ireland in that plight … He shall heal Banbha’s wounds. The poet goes on to hint that at least some of these wounds have been selfinflicted, when in the closing verses he depicts the old Áed Remor on his deathbed begging his sons not to fight with each other: pp 89–90. 66 J.F. Lydon, The lordship of Ireland in the Middle Ages (2nd ed., Dublin, 2003), pp 121–57; J.A. Watt, ‘The Anglo-Irish colony under strain, 1327–99’ in NHI 2, pp 352–96, at pp 366–7; Kevin Down, ‘Colonial society and economy in the high Middle Ages’ in NHI 2, pp 439–91, at pp 448–50, 461–3; J.L. Bolton, ‘Irish migration to England in the late Middle Ages: the evidence of 1394 and 1440’, IHS, 32:125 (2000), 1–21; W.R. Childs, ‘Irish merchants and seamen in late medieval England’, IHS, 32:125 (2000), 22–43; Virginia Davis, ‘Irish clergy in late medieval England’, IHS, 32:126 (2000), 145–60. See above, p. 121. 67 Gilbert, Chart. St Mary’s, 2, p. 389; Williams, The Annals of Ireland by Friar John Clyn, pp 238–9; Ann. Conn., pp 298–9. 68 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., p. 298; Ann. Conn., pp 336–9; AU 2, pp 540–1 (AD1369). One of a number of poems composed by Earl Gerald ‘the Rhymer’ while in O’Brien’s prison, complains that he has been captive there for fifteen

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages Said Aodh of Eamhain: ‘Do not do anything that might weaken yourselves – that is what your enemies desire. Be mindful of your blood-relationship.’69

Strangely enough, the succession struggle that raged between Áed Remor’s sons Niall Mór and Domnall O’Neill, from 1364 to 1370, ended with the victor, Niall Mór, holding a more powerful position than his father had enjoyed. Both sides in the struggle had imported regiments of Clan Alexander MacDonald galloglasses from the Western Isles, and leaders from this branch of the MacDonald family settled permanently in Tír Eógain, receiving land around the modern Ballygawley, and becoming hereditary constables in O’Neill’s service.70 Domnall O’Neill drew his support from O’Hanlon of Airthir (south county Armagh),71 and from Niall mac Murchada MacMahon, one of two rival claimants to the kingship of Airgialla (county Monaghan), who was himself allied with the Clan Alexander MacDonalds, through his sister’s marriage to Eóin Dub MacDonald. The other claimant to the kingship of Airgialla was the formidable Brian MacMahon, victor of the great battle against the men of Louth in 1346, but long excluded from supreme power in his own territory, perhaps through O’Neill influence. In 1365, the year after Áed Remor O’Neill’s death, Brian MacMahon finally seized the kingship of Airgialla from Niall mac Murchada MacMahon. He then attempted to transfer the support of the Clan Alexander MacDonald to his own side by another marriage alliance, this time with Somairle MacDonald, the son of Eóin Dub. Something went wrong with the arrangement, and Brian ended by treacherously capturing Somairle and drowning him in a lake. (See Fig. 16) Domnall O’Neill, as honour demanded of one claiming to be king of Tír Eógain and overlord of Airgialla, gathered a great army to confront and punish Brian MacMahon. This force naturally included the vengeful MacDonald galloglasses, and the deposed Niall mac Murchada MacMahon, but Domnall Ó Néill and his brother Toirdelbach also ‘gave large donatives and brotherhood and peace’ to the Clandeboy O’Neills, ‘namely to Brian son of Henry Ua Néill, together with his kinsmen’.72 This end to the feud between the O’Neills of Tír months already – Gearóid Mac Niocaill, ‘Duanaire Ghearóid Iarla’, Studia Hibernica, 3 (1963), 7–59: 39. 69 Cuthbert Mhág Craith (ed.), Dán na mBráthar Mionúr (2 vols, Dublin, text 1967, trans. 1980), 2, pp 1, 4. 70 AU 2, pp 518–27 (AD1365, 1366); Hayes-McCoy, Scots mercenary forces, p. 26; D.M. Schlegel, ‘The MacDonnells of Tyrone and Armagh, a genealogical study’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 10:1 (1980), 193–219. See also the following extract from a note on the forces available to Shane Ó Néill (d.1567) in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Carte MS 55, f. 591, ‘This Ballyngawle is the land of the MaccDonells who are a septe of Galoglas and MaccDonell is alwayes cheffe capten of the same. He hath undernethe him in this country cawled Ballygawle thes many names of contrys followinge viz. Ballyrewghe, Clan enys, Cosse one, Clan Erte, which Clan Erte reachethe within tow myles of the castell of Dongannon. He doth not use to make any horsmen but all fotemen and maye macke of them V or VI C [500 or 600].’ I owe this reference to Nicholas Canny. 71 Smith, Reg. Swetemen, pp 95–8, 205–6. 72 AU 2, pp 520–1 (AD1365).

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The fourteenth century: absenteeism and Gaelic recovery The MacMahon kings of Airgialla Mathgamain Echaid Kg of Airgialla (d.1273)

Brian ‘of the Mass Chalices’ Kg of Airgialla (d.1311) Murchad Mór Kg (d.1331) sl. by Seaán Murchad Óc Kg 1 wk (d.1344)

Niall mc Murchada Kg (d.1368)

daughter (m. Eoin Dub MacDonald)

Roalb (d.1314)

Áed Kg (d.1344)

Máelechlainn

Pilip Kg (d.1362)

Seaán Kg (d.1342)

Magnus Kg (d.1357) slew Eoin Dub MacDonald

Brian Mór Kg (d.1372) slew Somairle MacDonald 1365, slew Niall mc M 1368

Pilip Rúad Kg (d.1402)

Echaid

Ardgal Kg (d.1416)

Brian Kg (d.1442)

Magnus lord of Fernmag (d.1443)

Fig. 16 The MacMahon kings of Airgialla fourteenth to early fifteenth centuries, illustrating relations with the Clan Alexander MacDonald galloglasses. Kings in bold, nicknames in italics.

Eógain and the O’Neills of Clandeboy rapidly came to include Niall Mór, the next king of Tír Eógain. Brian MacMahon continued recalcitrant and when, in 1368, Niall Mór himself invaded Airgialla, the Ulster annalist states that ‘the nobles of all the Province [of Ulster] (maithi in Cóicid uile)’ joined his army, and styles him ‘king of the province of Ulster, and one worthy to be high-king of Ireland’.73 Brian O’Neill, chief of Clandeboy, died in 1369. His brother Muirchertach succeeded as head of his own branch of the family, but led a career so overshadowed by his paramount lord, Niall Mór, that his first name does not appear in the annals, and is only known from contemporary genealogies.74 73 ‘Sluaighed mor do dhenum le Niall h-Ua Neill, la righ Coicidh Uladh & la h-adhbur airdrigh Erenn a n-Oirghiallaibh & maithi in Coicidh uile d’eirghi leis’ AU 2, pp 532–3 (AD1368). I have slightly adjusted Mac Carthy’s translation to give a more literal rendering of the text. 74  AU 2, pp 538–9 (AD1369); Robert Atkinson (ed.), The Book of Ballymote (facsimile, Dublin, 1887), p. 77, column c, line 5; Eoin MacNeill and Kathleen Mulchrone

Rudraige Kg (d.1446)

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Muirchertach died in 1395 and was buried in Armagh,75 his final resting-place perhaps symbolizing the closeness of his ties to the ruler of Tír Eógain. The succession struggle between Niall Mór and Domnall O’Neill was settled in 1370 by an agreement to divide Tír Eógain between them, with Domnall acknowledging Niall’s overlordship. The area allotted to Domnall was apparently in the west of the territory, away from his former allies, and when nine years later he rose up again in alliance with Philip Maguire, the king of Fir Manach, he was defeated in the Battle of Dreich by Niall Mór and Niall’s second son, Henry Aimréid (‘H. the Turbulent’). Henry Aimréid O’Neill then succeeded to his uncle Domnall’s authority in western Tír Eógain, and in the following year, put an end to the long O’Donnell wars of succession by placing his brother-in-law, Toirdelbach an Fhína (‘T. of the Wine’) O’Donnell on the throne of Tír Conaill.76 Toirdelbach ‘of the Wine’ proved a powerful and long-lived king. His relationship with Niall Mór was not subservient, but his marriage to Gráinne, the daughter of O’Neill, and the threat of a renewed challenge from his dynastic rivals, ensured that he usually kept on good terms with Tír Eógain. The O’Neills’ problem with Brian MacMahon was solved when that chief was assassinated by one of his own galloglasses while on a raid against the English of Louth in 1372. The fact that the annals term him ‘high-king of Airgialla’,77 rather than merely ‘king of Airgialla’ like his predecessors, is one more indication that Brian had aimed at independence from both the colonists and Tír Eógain. His son Philip Rúad (‘P. the Red-haired’) MacMahon, who became the next king of Airgialla, was not so opposed to holding the status of a vassal-king. The record of a truce organized in 1373 between the Irish of Ulster and the Anglo-Irish magnates of Louth and Meath shows Niall Mór O’Neill and his brother Toirdelbach associated with the head of Clan Alexander MacDonald, ‘leader of the Scots dwelling in Ulster’, MacMahon of Airgialla and Magennis of Uí Echach Ulad (south county Down).78 With the chieftains Magennis and O’Neill of Clandeboy both now owing allegiance to Niall Mór O’Neill, there was no protective buffer of independent territories between the Anglo-Irish colony in Antrim and Down and the king of Tír Eógain, or as he was sometimes styled, the ‘king of the province of Ulster’ (‘rí Cóicid Ulad’).79 This was the period, according to the Dublin chronicler, in which Sir Robert Savage’s prophecy was vindicated, when he said that in future (eds), The Book of Lecan (facsimile, Dublin, 1937), f. 56r, column a, line 31. 75 AFM 4, pp 734–5. 76 AU 2, pp 542–3 (AD1370), 3, pp 3–5 (AD1379, 1380); Ann. Clonm., pp 306–7; Walsh, Beatha Aodha Ruaidh, 2, p. 168. See Simms, ‘Tír Eoghain “North of the Mountain”’, pp 166–7. 77 Ann. Conn., pp 340–1; AU 2, pp 546–7 (AD1372). The traditional account of this incident in the early seventeenth-century tract ‘Cíos Mhic Mhathghamhna’ (Seosamh Ó Dufaigh, ‘Cíos Mhic Mhathghamhna’, Clogher Record, 4 (1962), 125–33: 126, Séamus Pender, ‘Cíos Mhic Mhathghamhna’, Études Celtiques, 1 (1936), 248–60: 249, 253) names the galloglass as a local man, Cúchonnacht Mór Ó Birn, and said he was bribed by the English. 78 Smith, Reg. Sweteman, pp 13–15. 79 AU 2, pp 532, 542, 550 (AD1368, 1370, 1374).

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his sons would regret not having erected castles to defend the Ulster colony, since it came to pass the Irish destroyed the whole country for lack of castles.80 The border fortress of Drumtarsy, west of the Lower Bann near Coleraine, was destroyed between 1367 and 1373. In 1375, Magennis destroyed Greencastle, county Down; and as late as 1382 neither stronghold had been rebuilt.81 In 1373, the earldom of Ulster passed into the hands of Edmund Mortimer, husband of Philippa, the daughter and heiress of Lionel of Clarence. The Mortimer family harboured a real ambition to restore the ancient authority of the de Burgh earls, not only in Ulster, but also in the province of Connacht, where the Mayo Burkes were ruling in almost total independence. Edmund Mortimer sent ‘an outstanding knight’, the Meathman Sir James de la Hyde, escheator of Ireland, to represent his interests in Ulster, but at the Battle of Downpatrick, in 1374, O’Neill and Magennis defeated and killed Sir James and many of the magnates who accompanied him, including ‘de Burgh of Camlin’, most probably Sir John de Burgh of Camlin, who had served as seneschal of Ulster under Prince Lionel.82 The Irish seem to have been greatly elated by this victory. In August 1374, Archbishop Milo Sweteman of Armagh was horrified to hear confidential reports that Niall Mór O’Neill ‘with devilish and sacrilegious audacity’ was daily and publicly threatening to build his chief stronghold, his longphort, inside the Iron-Age enclosure of Emain Macha, now simply a grass-grown hill situated on the archbishop’s land, a couple of miles west of Armagh (see Plate I). Moreover, ‘unfaithful to God and disobedient to the Church’, he was said to be claiming, ‘as if he were Pope or Emperor’, that all the church lands of Armagh belonged to him, that the clergy should have nothing but the cathedral building itself.83 Clearly this renewed interest in Emain Macha, the alleged site of the palace of the prehistoric king, Conchobar mac Nessa, was linked to the O’Neills’ recent assumption of the title ‘king of the province of Ulster’. Warrior culture was in fashion among the resurgent Gaelic leaders of the late fourteenth century. There is evidence that both Niall Mór’s son Niall Óc O’Neill (d.1403), and the soi-disant ‘king of Leinster’, Art MacMurrough Kavanagh 80 Gilbert, Chart. St Mary’s, 2, pp 391–4; Ann. Grace, p. 144. 81 Gilbert, Chart. St Mary’s, 2, p. 283; Rot. Canc. Hib., pp 115, no. 219; 118, no. 102. 82 Gilbert, Chart. St Mary’s, 2, p. 283; Charles McNeill and A.J. Otway-Ruthven (eds), Dowdall Deeds (Dublin, 1960), p. 103; H.G. Richardson and G.O. Sayles, The Irish parliament in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia and London, 1952), p. 132; idem, The administration of Ireland, 1172–1377 (Dublin, 1963), p. 129; William Betham, ‘Excerpta Rotulis Pipae Hiberniae’, vol. 2, Dublin, NLI MS no. 761, p. 219; AU 2, pp 550–54; Ann. Conn., pp 342–5. The Irish annals erroneously record this battle twice, under 1374 and 1375, but the date is fixed as 1374 by the document from the Dowdall Deeds referred to above. Camlin is a parish in county Antrim, on the shores of Lough Neagh opposite Ram’s Island, and the presence of an Anglo-Irish landowner there in 1374 demonstrates that the Ulster settlers were not yet confined to the coastline of Antrim and Down. 83 Smith, Reg. Sweteman, pp 11–12.

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(d.1417), went bare-legged and bare-footed even on ceremonial occasions, and in the colder seasons of the year.84 Since Art MacMurrough, for example, is said to have bought his much-prized warhorse for 400 cows,85 (see Plate VIII) this costume choice had clearly nothing to do with poverty.86 More sinister is the hint of a revived interest in cultic warrior-bands, the díbergaig of yore, the sort of men regarded in the later medieval version, which is all that survives, of the saga Immram Curaig Úa Corra as having undergone ‘baptism into the devil’s possession’.87 In 1375, the archbishop of Armagh wrote to Niall Mór O’Neill urging him to control the activities of his younger sons, Henry Aimréid and Cú Ulad Rúad (‘C. the Red-haired’), whom the archbishop describes as ‘degenerate hunters ordained by the devil’ who are raping the wives of a number of husbands, along with their hand-maidens, so that all his citizens and tenants of the church lands of Armagh are intending to leave their holdings because of these sins.88 A partial solution was to emerge when Niall Mór, as we have seen, sent Henry Aimréid to take charge of the western districts of Tír Eógain from 1379 onwards. He is credited with making his headquarters in the modern Newtownstewart, where the town is still dominated by ‘Harry Avery’s Castle’ on the hill above, and the excavation of the ruins in 1950 found nothing inconsistent with this association.89 (See Fig. 17) The ill-fame of Henry Aimréid O’Neill himself and his sons out-lived them, and passed into modern folklore in the Newtownstewart area. We are told, ‘his very name, whispered with bated breath, was the synonym of Irish barbarity and cruelty’.90 His brother, Cú Ulad Rúad O’Neill seems to have remained in the Armagh area, and acknowledged paternity of at least one illegitimate son, ‘Domnall of Armagh’, who grew up to oppress the citizens of Armagh in his turn.91 Meanwhile the absentee earl of March and Ulster was intent on reasserting his authority over his Irish lands. Having originally planned an expedition to Ireland in 1373–4,92 by 1379 Edmund Mortimer was given the office of king’s lieutenant in Ireland. At this time he commissioned a catalogue of all the 84  Carpenter, ‘The pilgrim from Catalonia’, p. 110; Gilbert, Facsimiles, 3, plate 33. 85 Edmund Curtis, A history of medieval Ireland from 1110 to 1513 (1st ed., Dublin, 1923), p.  317; John Webb, ‘Translation of a French metrical history of the deposition of King Richard II’, Archaeologia, 20 (1824), 1–423: 42. Below, p. 470. 86 Simms, ‘The barefoot kings’. 87 See below, pp 428–9. 88 Smith, Reg. Sweteman, pp 139–40, see Simms, ‘The archbishops of Armagh and the O’Neills, 47 note 33. Rape was among the misdeeds attributed to the early díbergaig; see Kim McCone, ‘Werewolves, cyclopes, díberga and fíanna: juvenile delinquency in early Ireland’, CMCS, 12 (Winter 1986), 1–22: 13. 89 E.M. Jope, H.M. Jope and E.A. Johnson, ‘Harry Avery’s castle, Newtownstewart, Co. Tyrone, Excavations in 1950’, UJA, 3rd ser., 13 (1950), 81–92: 81, 91–2. 90 Thomas Mathews, The O’Neills of Ulster (3 vols, Dublin, 1907), 2, p. 248. 91 Katharine Simms, ‘The legal position of Irishwomen in the later Middle Ages’, Irish Jurist, new ser., 10 (1975), 96–111: 103. 92  Sheelagh Harbison, ‘William of Windsor, the court party and the administration in Ireland’ in Eng. & Ire., ed. Lydon, pp 153–74, at pp 160–3.

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Fig. 17 Harry Avery’s Castle, Newtownstewart, by kind permission of Frank McGettigan.

ancestral charters he possessed from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, including those that documented the de Burgh rights over the chieftains of Ulster and Connacht.93 When, in May 1380, Mortimer arrived in Ireland, accompanied by a large armed retinue, he made his headquarters at Downpatrick for at least two months. Many Irish chiefs from the districts where he had a hereditary claim to authority came in to submit: O’Farrell (Ó Fergail) of Longford, O’Reilly of Cavan, Mageoghegan (Mág Eochacán) and ‘the Fox’ (An Sinnach, otherwise Ó Catharnaig, O’Kearney), both from Westmeath, came from the perimeters of the Mortimer lordship of Trim, and from Ulster came Niall Mór Ó Néill, ‘the heir to the king[ship] of Ireland’ as the Annals of Ulster term him, together with 93 Herbert Wood, ‘The muniments of Edmund de Mortimer, third earl of March, concerning his Liberty of Trim’, PRIA, 40C (1932), 312–55; Edmund Curtis, ‘Feudal charters of the de Burgo lordship of Connacht, 1237–1325’ in Féilsgríbhinn Eóin Mhic Néill, pp 286–95; Frame, ‘A register of lost deeds’.

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O’Hanlon of Armagh and Art na Madmann (‘A. of the defeats’) Magennis of south Down. All were completely taken aback when Magennis was seized ‘by treachery in the house of the Mortimer’, and imprisoned in the castle of Trim, where he died of the plague three years later.94 The Anglo-Irish annals had consistently highlighted the role of Magennis, rather than O’Neill, in recording the Irish chieftains’ raids on the Ulster colony and the killing of Sir James de la Hyde, and presumably this was the version that Mortimer had heard. According to the Annals of Clonmacnoise it was after this confrontational move that Mortimer brought his army on a raid far into western Tír Eógain, which incidentally destroyed church settlements at Clogher, Errigal-keeroge, Urney and Donaghmore,95 just inside the border of the modern county Donegal. This foray into western Ulster is hard to explain in terms of defence of the Anglo-Irish colony in Antrim and Down, but might be seen as punishment for Henry Aimréid O’Neill and Toirdelbach ‘of the Wine’ O’Donnell, if these were the most prominent Ulster chiefs who had still not submitted. Mortimer went on to re-take the royal castle of Athlone, on the frontier between his lordship of Trim and the Irish of Connacht. That autumn, when summoning the lords and commons of the Anglo-Irish community to meet in parliament at Dublin, Mortimer broke with tradition by sending the same summons to the bishops of the Gaelic-Irish dioceses in Ulster: Raphoe, Clogher, Kilmore and Derry,96 clearly indicating that he intended the authority of the English king he represented, reinforced by his own power as a great landowner, to extend islandwide. He then spent the year of 1381 warring vigorously to subdue the Irish in Leinster and Munster. However any political gains for the colony were negated when Earl Edmund Mortimer died young on 26 December 1381, leaving his seven-year-old son Roger as heir. This sudden calamity deprived the settlers not only of their chief governor for the time being, but of the services of Mortimer’s armed followers, and the family wealth that had maintained them.97 Once more the earldom of Ulster was administered on behalf of its underage heir by royal officials, and the first appointments, of Sir Hugh Cheyne as seneschal of the earldom, and John fitzRery as sheriff of the crosslands, chancellor and treasurer of Ulster,98 were of men associated with the Dublin government,99 suggesting a lack of faith in the loyalty or ability of the Ulster settlers. The Magennis dynasty were no longer a menace to the colony. Until his death in 1373 their chief remained imprisoned in Trim, and a son of his less 94 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 313–14; AU 3, pp 4–5 (AD1380); AFM 4, pp 676–9, 690–1. Art Magennis’s nickname ‘of the defeats’ refers, of course, to defeats he successfully inflicted on his enemies, including Sir James de la Hyde. 95 Ann. Clonm., pp 306–7. 96 Rot. Canc. Hib., pp 108, no. 63; 109, no. 101. 97 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 315–16. 98 Rot. Canc. Hib., pp 109, no. 74; 111, nos. 50–1; 112, no. 105. 99 Hugh Cheyne may have been related to Ralph Cheyne, deputy justiciar of Ireland in 1373 (Richardson and Sayles, Administration, p. 90), and John fitz Rery was the escheator of Ireland.

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aggressive brother and successor, Muirchertach Óc (‘M. the younger’) Magennis, had been seized at the same time, and held as a hostage.100 Niall Mór O’Neill, however, redoubled his attacks, now concentrating on the Antrim area. His aim was apparently not to exterminate the Anglo-Irish, but to rule them. Jenkin ‘the Fair-haired’ (‘Seinicín Finn’) Bisset, lord of the Glens of Antrim, was married to Sadb, daughter of Áed O’Neill,101 and during a destructive invasion by Niall Mór and his followers in 1383, Bisset took the side of Áed Óc O’Neill (his brother-in-law?) and assassinated Raibilín (‘Little Ralph’) Savage, a leader of the colonists, who had been wounded in battle, and sought refuge in his house. The following year, on 10 April, Niall Mór burned Carrickfergus and, say the annals, acquired great power over the Foreigners,102 an expression that usually implies the surrender of hostages and payment of tribute. The Dublin government sent an expedition northwards to treat with O’Neill, though the truce then arrived at was inadequately guaranteed by the chief ’s fifteenthmonth-old baby grandson as hostage, Cú Ulad son of Cú Ulad Rúad O’Neill.103 After this, there was a change of direction in central government policy in favour of delegating responsibility for the earldom to the local gentry. In 1385, the most powerful Anglo-Irish magnate in eastern Ulster, Edmund Savage, was appointed keeper of the crosslands and seneschal of Ulster, a position he was to retain and wield very effectively for the next thirteen years.104 Another local man, Richard Russell, was made chief baron of the exchequer and justice of the liberty of Ulster, and later became chancellor and treasurer there.105 In 1387, Thomas de Mandeville, grandson of Sir Henry de Mandeville the younger, obtained a confirmation of his grandfather’s hereditary appointment to command the ‘bonaght of Ulster’,106 though this would remain an empty honour unless some of the Irish chiefs could be brought back to their former status as vassals. Meanwhile Niall Mór O’Neill appeared to turn his attention from east Ulster to attacking the colonists of county Louth. In 1385 he supported his vassal-chief, Philip Rúad MacMahon of Airgialla, in threatening to destroy two religious houses there, whose heads requested government authorization to parley with the Irish chiefs.107 The conflict was not one-sided – the gentry of Louth were a ‘truculent’ community108 led at this time by one Geoffrey White, who had long 100 Curtis, Richard II, p. 89. 101 AU 3, pp 18–19 (AD1387). 102 AU 3, pp 10–15 (AD1383, 1384); AFM 4, pp 688–91, 694–5. 103 This Cú Ulad Gallda (‘C. the Anglicized’) remained in custody for the next sixteen years ‘often forfeited’, and seems to have been eventually ordained a priest in Armagh diocese: Rot. Canc. Hib., pp 122, no. 29; 151, no. 19; Cal. pat. rolls, 1399–1401, pp 327, 330; Sughi, Reg. Octaviani, 2, pp 61, 97, 99. Genealogy in RIA MS 1233 (23/Q/10), f. 36r, col. b. Cú Ulad’s name also appears, but misplaced, in Ó Muraíle, The Gt Bk of Ir. Gen., 1, p. 296 §119.9. 104 Rot. Canc. Hib., pp 132, no. 48; 139, no. 80; 146, no. 198; Cal. close rolls, 1392–6, p. 20; Cal. pat. rolls, 1396–9, p. 419. On the Savage family’s role in Ulster at this period, see Simms, ‘The Ulster revolt of 1404’. 105 Rot. Canc. Hib., pp 126, no. 170; 129, no. 33; 137, no. 10; 140, no. 116. 106 Cal. pat. rolls, 1385–9, p. 308. See above, pp 119, 122. 107 Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 127, no. 210. 108 Smith, Colonization and

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maintained a feud against the O’Neills,109 and in 1387 the men of Dundalk killed a certain Conchobar son of Brian Carrach (‘B. the Scabby’) O’Neill.110 Niall Mór himself was later to write to King Richard II: ‘If in anything I have sinned against your Majesty’s subjects I did this not as denying your lordship, for I have ever recognized your lordship and do ever recognize it, and could I have had redress from any officer of yours for the wrongs inflicted upon me, I would never have taken redress into my own hands’.111 By now, however, leadership within the Cenél Eógain was passing from the ageing, and perhaps more moderate, Niall Mór O’Neill, to his ambitious eldest son, Niall Óc (‘N. the younger’). The institution of Gaelic kingship allowed for an amicable sharing of power between an older ruler and his heir without formal deposition – the heir could rule for a while as ‘rí re láim a athar’, ‘king by the side of his father’.112 The first sign of Niall Óc taking a more prominent role came in 1387, when he held a general gathering of the learned classes of Ireland in a banqueting hall constructed for this purpose at Emain Macha, the site of the legendary palace of Conchobar mac Nessa, where his father had once threatened to erect his chief seat.113 Two surviving bardic poems addressed to Niall Óc O’Neill114 may well have been composed for this occasion, since both make repeated references to Emain Macha, Cú Chulainn and Conchobar mac Nessa, calling Niall Óc ‘a lord greater than Conchobhar’, and praising his extravagant generosity to poets. His promotion to the high-kingship of Ireland is foretold, and his reckless bravery in battle is given such prominence that one must assume it contained a good deal of truth, as inappropriate praise on such a subject could look like satire: He will lead his own soldiers to the fight, and his hired men will hardly be able to keep up with him; the prince is first at the danger-point, outstripping all of the race of fair Eoghan … I say this to Eoghan’s scion: ‘When thou comest to danger-gap, thou thinkest thou hast to face every single man on the battle-field: … Niall Ó Néill is a proved warrior – this is shown by the state of his foe; never shall Tulach Óg’s host learn of a defeat of his … He will never, I know, think of peace till he has saved the fair land; until he shall have taken power in Éire, Féilim’s land exists only as a phantasy …115 Another Ulster leader, Niall Garb II O’Donnell (d.1439), was to find himself in difficulties more than once as a result of his habit of charging ahead of the conquest, p. 158. 109  Smith, Reg. Swetemen, pp 7–9, 229–30; Ann. Conn., pp 364–5; Ó Donnchadha, Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe, pp 33–4. 110  Ann. Conn., pp 356–7. 111  Curtis, Richard II, p. 211. 112  Donnchadh Ó Corráin, ‘Irish regnal succession, a reappraisal’, Studia Hibernica, 11 (1971), 7–39: 36; Simms, From kings to warlords, p. 52. 113  AU 3, pp 18–19 (AD1387); Simms, ‘Propaganda use’, pp 142–4; above, p. 131. 114 Aithd., 1, pp 54–64; 2, pp 33–9. 115 Aithd., 2, pp 33–5, verses 8, 10, 16, 34.

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main body of his army.116 It may have been in similar circumstances that, in 1389, Niall Óc O’Neill was captured by Edmund de Londres, nominal constable of the ‘Bonaght of Ulster’, constable of Greencastle, county Down, of Carlingford Castle in county Louth, and warden of the lordship of the Cooley peninsula.117 The Anglo-Irish, and above all the supporters of Roger Mortimer, the underage heir to the earldom of Ulster, considered this capture a most important event for the future safety of the colony, but the new justiciar, Sir John de Stanley, released Niall Óc in February 1390 in exchange for a ransom and the handing over of his eldest son, Brian Óc O’Neill, and a pair of nephews, the second sons of his two brothers Henry Aimréid and Cú Ulad Rúad O’Neill, and four other unnamed individuals as hostages. An English summary of the agreement then drawn up between the justiciar and the O’Neills still survives. The old Niall Mór O’Neill and his sons undertook to be faithful subjects or liegemen of the English king, true to the king and the earl of March and his heirs. They also promised to yield back and not to intermeddle with the bonnaughe of Ulster; but that the king for his time, and the earl of Marche, when he shall be of full years, and his heirs shall at their will, without contradiction of O Neale, his sons and heirs, dispose the said bonnaughe for ever. The king and the earl were to have the lordships, rents, exactions and answerings of all the Irishmen of Ulster and Uriell [Airgialla], ‘as amply as the ancestors of the king and the earl of Ulster of antiquity have used to have; reserving to O Neale and his successors such things as of old custom they have used to have of them’.118 The qualifying clause in this last sentence went far to negate the previous concession, since Niall Mór could claim that his ancestors had ruled as provincial kings over all the other chieftains in Tír Eógain, Ulaid and Airgialla, demanding their exclusive loyalty, tribute and military service, whereas the de Burgh earls had also claimed these same rights over their Irish tenant chiefs in Ulster, treating O’Neill as just one more local ruler alongside the others. The wording of the treaty was a fudge, which gave rise to angry disputes later on. The Mortimer party were outraged by this ‘idiotic release’ (foole deliverance) of the earldom’s chief enemy and destroyer, and Sir John Stanley became the subject of a commission of enquiry in 1391 concerning the way he had conducted himself in office, with specific investigation of 116 Katharine Simms, ‘Niall Garbh II O’Donnell, king of Tír Conaill, 1422–39’, Donegal Annual, 12:1 (1977), 7–21: 13–14, 18; eadem, ‘Images of warfare in bardic poetry’, Celtica, 21 (1990), 608–19: 609–10; Aithd., 1, pp 85–6; 2, p. 51. 117 Rot. Canc. Hib., pp 138, nos. 43–5; 145, no. 140; AU 3, pp 20–1 (AD1389). On the ‘Bonaght of Ulster’ see above, pp 119, 122, 135. 118 Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 147, nos. 222, 240; Cal. Carew MSS, 1, pp 288–9.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages the capture of Neel, the elder son of Neel O Neel, the rebel Irish chief of Ulster, by whom, how and for what ransom he was released, and whether to the king’s advantage or loss, and of the capture and release of all other Irish prisoners and rebels since the coming of John Stanley justiciary of Ireland.119

Justification for the general indignation may be found in the contemporary description of ‘the lordship and county of Ulster being so wasted by attacks from the Irish enemies of the king that very small profit can be had therefrom and the castle [of Carrickfergus] so destitute that its capture and the loss of the adjacent country is much to be feared.’120 In 1392 Niall Óc led the ‘nobles of the Province’ to attack and defeat the men of Dundalk, killing his old enemy Geoffrey White, who as one of the two keepers of the peace for county Louth, was leading the defence.121 By now, Niall Óc held the son of Edmund Savage, seneschal of the liberty of Ulster, and other members of the Savage family as hostages, presumably to guarantee payment of ‘black-rent’, or regular instalments of protection-money. In the spring of 1393, however, he handed over the Savages along with seven other hostages ‘of little or no value’ (as Mortimer wrote), in exchange for whom, the king’s council in Ireland agreed to release his eldest son, Brian Óc O’Neill, ‘in contempt of the king, to the hurt of his said subjects and in peril of their utter ruin’.122 Roger Mortimer complained indignantly to King Richard II that, since his release, Niall Óc, chieftain of the Irish of Ulster, had often forfeited his hostages by going on hosting with a great force of Irish and Scots to burn and destroy both the lordship of Ulster and much of county Louth.123 In June 1393, Mortimer, though not yet of full age, was granted control of his Irish lands, and in July Niall Óc’s hostages were delivered into his custody because ‘in the time of the earl’s nonage his lands were much wasted by the said [Niall] and [Brian Óc] and by their adherents and the king is aware that he would keep their hostages in the more careful custody because his lands were by them and their adherents wasted, and are like to be in time to come, if the said hostages should be set free’. Interestingly, the hostages of Edmund Savage were not to be returned to the seneschal, but kept by Mortimer along with the other hostages handed over by O’Neill, unless express order for their release was sent by the 119 Cal. pat. rolls, 1389–92, p. 404. Stanley was replaced in office that year by the bishop of Meath – Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 322–3. 120  Cal. pat. rolls, 1389–92, p. 405. 121 Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 147, no. 242; AU 3, pp 26–7 (AD1392); AFM 4, pp 722–5. According to the Four Masters and the Leabhar Eoghanach, Niall Óc slew Geoffrey White in single combat – Ó Donnchadha, Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe, p. 34. On the office of Keeper of the Peace, see Frame, Ireland and Britain, pp 301–17. 122  James Graves, A roll of the proceedings of the king’s council in Ireland (London, 1877), p. 191; Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 151, no.  19; Cal. close rolls, 1392–6, pp 157–8. 123  London, Public Record Office, Ancient Correspondence, S.C. 8/189/9434.

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king under the Great Seal of England.124 Edmund Savage was a powerful figure in Ulster,125 and capable of despising the king’s commands when they ran counter to his own financial interests.126 Already in 1388, the year in which Edmund’s kinsman Robert Savage married Christiana MacDonald, sister of the Lord of the Isles, the royal castle of Carrickfergus was ordered to be removed from Edmund’s custody.127 As the grandson of Prince Lionel of Clarence, Roger Mortimer was a close kinsman of the childless Richard II. His ambitions were therefore taken seriously at the English court, and there seems no doubt that, like his father before him, Roger Mortimer yearned for a restoration of the authority that the de Burgh earls had once wielded over half the island of Ireland. Soon after his coming of age, his Welsh bard, Iolo Goch, addressed a eulogy to him which included the advice: Make haste and claim completely the land of Ulster, thou of Elystan’s fame. That is a dominion (?) filling a false boundary, Demand it as thine on the edge of Dundalk. After capturing Great Niall, my lord – Ulster dog from a stock of false growth – Thou, belfry of fame, wilt kill The people of Ulster with every further blow.128

THE EXPEDITIONS OF KING RICHARD II

Repeatedly during the second half of the fourteenth century, the English government had tried to halt the decline of its colony in Ireland by sending, or in some cases only planning to send, heavily subsidized military expeditions led by prominent figures from the inner circles at court, such as Prince Lionel of Clarence and William of Windsor. The last and greatest efforts of this policy were the two expeditions led by King Richard II himself in 1394–5 and 1399.129 On the first of these interventions, the king commanded an army that has been 124  Cal. close rolls, 1392–6, pp 157–8. 125  ‘Rex considerans magnum locum quem Edmundus Savage, senescallus libertatis Ultonie, tenet in partibus predictis’, Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 146, no. 198. 126 Cal. close rolls, 1392–6, pp 20–1. See Simms, ‘The Ulster revolt of 1404’, pp 145–8. 127 Cal. pat. rolls, 1385–9, pp 435, 438. Rot. Canc. Hib, p. 137, no. 218. 128 E.I. Rowlands, ‘Iolo Goch’ in J. Carney and D. Greene (eds), Celtic studies: essays in memory of Angus Matheson, 1912–62 (London, 1968), pp 124–46, p. 125. See R.R. Davies, The revolt of Owain Glyn Dwr (Oxford and New York, 1995), pp 38, 41. The Welsh term ‘Grednel’, line 131 of the poem, is a version of the English phrase ‘the Great O’Neill’. See below, pp 140, 153. 129 Lydon, The lordship of Ireland, pp 150–77; idem, ‘Richard II’s expeditions to Ireland’, JRSAI, 93 (1963), 135–49.

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estimated at c.8,000 or 10,000 troops130 and was accompanied by Earl Roger Mortimer and other great absentee lords, including the earls of Nottingham and Rutland, who were hoping to restore extensive lands they could claim in the southern part of Ireland to English control and profitability. Richard landed at Waterford on 2 October 1394, and organized a series of expeditions against Art MacMurrough Kavanagh and the Irish of Leinster. Before the end of that month MacMurrough, the O’Nolans (Uí Nualláin), O’Byrne (Ó Broin) and O’Toole (Ó Tuathail) had all submitted and sworn fealty to the English king, some kneeling with ropes about their necks. In the course of the winter, a rather impractical plan was devised whereby these Leinster chiefs and their followers were to vacate the province of Leinster completely, taking service in the English king’s army and being rewarded with lands conquered from rebel Irish in other parts of the island.131 Though the plan was never carried out, it increased the threat to the other Gaelic chiefs already posed by the king’s sizeable army. Meanwhile Mortimer had gone to his liberty of Trim in Meath, to reduce his Irish vassals there to obedience. O’Farrell of Longford submitted at Trim and was well treated, but the O’Reillys had to be persuaded by force. The Anglo-Irish cut a pass through the woods into their territory to allow the entrance of troops, and raided the Clann an Chaích branch of the O’Reillys (barony of Clankee, county Cavan). On 12 December 1394, Seaán O’Reilly, ‘chief of his nation’, submitted to Mortimer at Kells, county Meath, and agreed to a series of conditions in an indenture now lost. Another expedition was sent against Philip MacMahon of Airgialla.132 In the spring of 1395, one after another, the Ulster chieftains came in to do homage to King Richard, beginning with ‘the Great O’Neill senior’ (‘le grand O Nel le pere’), Niall Mór, who came to Richard at Drogheda on 20 January. His submission was followed over the next two months by ‘his son the Great O’Neill’ (‘le grand O Nel son fitz’), Niall Óc, together with his Scottish constable Eoin MacDonald, Niall O’Hanlon and Cú Ulad son of Echmarcach O’Hanlon of Armagh, Philip Rúad MacMahon of Airgialla, with his brothers Áed and Seaán, and his Scottish constable MacCabe (Mac Cába), Muirchertach Óc and Cú Ulad Magennis of Uí Echach Ulad (Dromore diocese), and Adam MacGilmore of Down.133 (see Plate IX) Even before O’Neill’s submission, as early as 8 January 1395, King Richard had been agreeably surprised to receive a most humble and eloquent letter in Latin from Niall Mór, styling himself tactfully not ‘king’ but ‘prince of the Irish of Ulster’ (Princeps Hibernicorum Ultonie).134 The letter itself was presumably 130 Lydon, ‘Richard II’s expeditions’, 42–3. 131 Darren McGettigan, Richard II and the Irish kings (Dublin, 2016), pp 106–19. 132 Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 152–3; Dublin, National Archives, Lodge MS, ‘Articles with Irish chiefs, denizations etc.’ [1A 53 66], p. 15. 133 Curtis, Richard II, pp 58, 60, 68–9, 70, 97, 98, 103, 106; M.D. Legge (ed.), Anglo-Norman letters and petitions from All Souls MS 182 (Oxford, 1941), p. 211; McGettigan, Richard II, pp 121–47. 134 Curtis, Richard II, pp 131–2, 211–12; Legge, Anglo-Norman letters, p. 209.

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composed by the well-educated Master Thomas O’Loughran (Ó Lúchairéin), secretary (clericus secretus) to Niall Óc, and later to become dean of Armagh.135 This missive and further correspondence from the effective chief, Niall Óc O’Neill, styling himself ‘Governor (Gubernator) of the Irish of Ulster’, from  Muirchertach Óc Magennis, from O’Cahan of Derry and from John MacDonald, captain of O’Neill’s galloglasses, together bring us as close as we can ever hope to come to understanding the minds of the medieval Ulster chieftains. They are, of course, all framed in terms of humble loyalty to King Richard II. It is interesting to note that the O’Neills, father and son, did homage on their knees to the English king, whereas we are told that Art MacMurrough Kavanagh made his initial submission on horseback,136 and Niall Óc reported that a number of the southern Irish including O’Brien, O’Conor and MacCarthy had urged him not to submit to Richard at all.137 The protestations of loyalty were no doubt influenced, as Lydon points out, by the threat of Richard’s large army. However certain points emerge from the Ulster letters. The O’Neills displayed quite a marked difference in their attitudes to the king and the earl of March, unsurprising since it had been royal ministers during March’s minority who had successively agreed to release both Niall Óc and his heir Brian Óc on relatively easy terms. Niall Mór had written to King Richard asking him to intervene as ‘a shield and helmet of justice’ between the O’Neills and Mortimer, that the earl might not demand more than his due.138 When he came to submit to the king in January, Niall Mór was mandated by his son to agree to hand back to the earl any lands he might have occupied illegally, to give up his usurped right to impose the ‘Bonaght of Ulster’, the billeting of fixed quotas of mercenaries, on the other Irish chiefs, and to render the earl all dues and services historically owed by the O’Neill to his predecessors, offers which seem to echo the terms of the indenture agreed with Sir John Stanley in February 1390.139 However the ambiguity inherent in the earlier indenture as regards the overlordship of other Ulster Irish led now to open dispute between Niall Mór and Mortimer, a dispute which King Richard offered to arbitrate at some future date.140 In advance of this arbitration (which never ultimately took place) Niall Óc began to shift his ground. Writing to Primate Colton of Armagh, Niall Óc stated that he held his dominion over the other Irish by a grant of the king’s predecessors to his forefathers,141 possibly a reference to the occasion when the justiciar Ralph D’Ufford appointed his grandfather, Áed Remor, as ‘king of Ulster’ in 1344, replacing the disgraced Henry O’Neill of Clandeboy.142 Before 135 Curtis, Richard II, p. 136, 216; Smith, Reg. Fleming, nos. 10, 44, 58, 127, 147, 161, 172, 191. 136  Curtis, Richard II, p. 78. MacMurrough later knelt to the king himself – see Edmund Curtis, ‘Unpublished letters from Richard II in Ireland, 1394–5’, PRIA, 37C (1927), 276–303: 291; McGettigan, Richard II, p. 111. 137 Curtis, Richard II, p. 143. 138 Ibid., p. 131. 139 See above, p. 137. 140 Curtis, Richard II, p. 145. 141 Ibid., p. 143. 142 Ibid., pp 86–7; see above, p. 122.

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coming in person to submit, Niall Óc subscribed himself as Richard’s ‘liegeman’ (homo ligeus),143 and afterwards referred with obvious reluctance to ‘my lord, if you will have him so, the earl of Ulster and March’ (dominus si volueritis meus Comes Ultonie et Marchie),144 suggesting that he had been unsuccessfully negotiating to be acknowledged as tenant-in-chief to the English king, and mesne lord between the king and the other Ulster chieftains. O’Neill’s expressed anxiety to have the custody of his hostages transferred from Mortimer to the king’s officers, as well as ensuring them kinder treatment, ‘since those in whose charge they are care little or nothing for their lives’,145 may also have related to his desire to hold from the king directly, and not as a tenant of the earl. Interestingly, the other letters the king received from Ulster were not unanimously supportive of O’Neill’s position. Eoin MacDonald, O’Neill’s constable, was clearly worried that if the ‘Bonaght of Ulster’ – O’Neill’s usurped right to billet quotas of mercenaries on the other Ulster chiefs – was surrendered, O’Neill would no longer be able to afford to employ him. He wrote directly to Richard, the Latin of his letter indicating that he used the services of a clerk other than O’Neill’s secretary, and emphasized that he was a Scot in exile, who owed no allegiance to O’Neill, offering himself to Richard as ‘troop-captain and constable’ (turbiferus et constabularius), to serve the king in any part of Ireland with as many armed men as required.146 Even more significant are letters from Muirchertach Óc Magennis, lord of Uí Echach in south Down. Like O’Neill, he was anxious for confirmation of his ancestral authority over the other chieftains in Uí Echach, whom he lists as MacCartan, Ó hAidíth, Mac Duilecháin and Mac Duibgemna, and he threatened outright rebellion if this was called into question. On the other hand, he acknowledged that he owed the ‘Bonaght of Ulster’ and other services to Mortimer as earl of Ulster, and complained bitterly of recent attacks on his territory by O’Neill and his followers from the Armagh side. Among these followers he named Niall Óc’s brother Cú Ulad Rúad O’Neill and O’Hanlon, chief of Airthir, while from county Down he was being assaulted by the seneschal of Ulster, Edmund Savage, and his employees, the sons of MacQuillin. He points out indignantly that both sets of attacks had taken place after Niall Mór’s submission in January and the proclamation of the king’s peace. This timing suggests the raids may have related to the dispute that arose between Mortimer and O’Neill in Drogheda as to whether Ulster chiefs were to render immediate subjection to Mortimer, Edmund Savage’s master, or to be recognized as vassals of O’Neill in the first place, paying their dues and services to the earldom through him as ‘Prince of the Irish of Ulster’. So severe was the threat to Magennis and his followers from both sides, that he brought all his herds, moveable goods and immediate followers with him to the marches of Dundalk 143 Curtis, Richard II, p. 127. 146 Ibid., pp 87–8, 175–6.

144 Ibid., p. 135.

145 Ibid., pp 134, 136, 213, 215–16.

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for protection, before he dared leave them to do homage to King Richard in person.147 Magnus O’Cahan, who ruled three-quarters of the modern county Derry, raised no objection to O’Neill’s claim to speak on his behalf; indeed, he sealed his letter with O’Neill’s own seal. In terms of native Irish political geography, he was a member of the Cenél Eógain, and so directly subject to O’Neill as king of  Tír Eógain, even though Mortimer’s collection of de Burgh charters demonstrated that former earls of Ulster had treated earlier O’Neill and O’Cahan chieftains on equal terms as fellow-tenants of the earldom. O’Cahan had been plundered of 500 cows by Jenkin MacQuillin, ‘the man of Edmund Savage’, after the proclamation of the king’s peace in January, and this too may have been an attempt to force him to yield direct allegiance to the earldom of Ulster rather than to O’Neill. Like O’Neill, O’Cahan spoke of receiving his lordship from King Richard directly, rather than through the Ulster earldom, ‘and I will pay him [Richard] rents for the lands on which of old rents used to be paid’. Mortimer’s role is only mentioned when O’Cahan claims that in his raids against the marcher English he was careful to spare as far as possible lands which were the particular property of the king or the earl.148 The longer the king postponed judgement on the issue of the overlordship of the Ulster Irish, the greater grew the tension. Just before Richard’s return to England in May 1395, still without giving a decision in the Mortimer–O’Neill dispute, he received yet another letter from Niall Óc, who had by now performed homage in person and had been knighted by the king. This letter warned Richard that it was public knowledge Mortimer would make outright war on O’Neill as soon as the king left. If Niall Óc remained passive, he would be destroyed, if he resisted he would be labelled as a rebel, unfaithful to his recent oath of allegiance. In the meantime, he asked the king to obtain from Mortimer a written reply to a proposal ‘with regard to granting MacDonald’s Bonaght’.149 This concluding paragraph suggests O’Neill had requested that the billeting of MacDonald’s galloglasses on the other chiefs in the name of ‘the Bonaght of Ulster’ be continued by O’Neill, on the understanding that these troops would serve the earl of March when required. An obvious alternative, which the seneschal Edmund Savage might have been expected to favour, would have been the appointment of MacQuillin to his ancestor’s post as constable of the Bonaght, and the billeting of MacQuillin’s troops on each of the Ulster chiefs individually, not by any arrangement through O’Neill. At all events, it appears Mortimer made no formal reply to whatever O’Neill had proposed. To O’Neill’s dismay, King Richard, when departing, appointed the young Mortimer to govern Ireland as king’s lieutenant, having special responsibility for Ulster, Connacht and Meath. Nevertheless, by negotiation and exhortatory 147 Ibid., pp 88–90, 140–1, 176–9, 219–20. 134–6, 214–16.

148 Ibid., pp 142–3, 220–1.

149 Ibid., pp

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letters, the English king managed to ensure the continuance of a precarious peace for one further year.150 The annals mention a strange episode that took place during this time, briefly giving Mortimer, like his father Edmund, an opportunity to become involved with the politics of western Ulster.151 Henry Aimréid O’Neill, the second son of Niall Mór, had established a subordinate lordship for himself in west Tír Eógain, very possibly centred on the castle named after him, ‘Harry Avery’s Castle’, above the modern Newtownstewart.152 Until his death in 1392 he appears to have enjoyed peaceful relations with the neighbouring kingdom of Tír Conaill. He had, after all, assisted his brother-in-law, Toirdelbach ‘of the Wine’ O’Donnell, to the throne of Tír Conaill in 1380, and in the earlier part of O’Donnell’s reign Toirdelbach ‘of the Wine’ was largely preoccupied with defending himself against the residual threat posed by his rival O’Donnell kinsmen and the O’Conor chiefs in north Sligo who supported them.153 Toirdelbach’s campaigns in this direction gradually led to a rebuilding of the overlordship that thirteenth-century O’Donnell kings had formerly claimed over the northern parts of Sligo and Leitrim. More controversially, the Four Masters, in noting the deaths of Toirdelbach’s predecessors, state that both Áed (d.1333) and Conchobar O’Donnell (d.1342) had been lords of Cenél Múáin also.154 Cenél Múáin, the land of the sub-chieftain O’Gormley, originally extended into the modern county Donegal, from Lifford to Ballybofey, an area still forming part of the diocese of Derry rather than Raphoe. The eastern half of Cenél Múáin lay in the modern county Tyrone between Castlederg and Newtownstewart, where Henry Aimréid had his headquarters, and it appears that the emergence of a strong O’Neill ruler in this border area led to a dispute over O’Donnell’s territorial claims there. In 1392, the year Henry Aimréid died, Toirdelbach ‘of the Wine’ O’Donnell invaded the lands of Henry’s sons, the Clann Henry Aimréid, plundered their subjects and captured their leader, Domnall Boc (‘D. the Generous’) O’Neill. The ‘Great O’Neill’ (probably at this time Niall Óc O’Neill acting in his father’s name) came to the rescue of his kinsmen, and brought the armies of the province of Ulster and an allied force from the O’Conors of Sligo to invade Tír Conaill, where he ravaged the subchief O’Doherty’s territory of Inishowen, before concluding a peace treaty with O’Donnell, whose terms are unknown, but apparently included the release of Domnall Boc.155 150 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 334–5; Dorothy Johnston, ‘The interim years: Richard II and Ireland, 1395–9’ in Eng. & Ire., ed. Lydon, pp 175–95, at pp 179–81. 151 See above, p. 134. 152 Jope, Jope and Johnson, ‘Harry Avery’s castle’. The excavators concluded that this castle could well be as early as the late fourteenth century, although the form of the name suggests confusion with a notorious seventeenth-century pirate Harry Avery, who once visited the west coast of Ireland briefly. See Simms, ‘The barefoot kings’, p. 16. 153 AU 3, pp 4– 5, 20–1 (AD1380, 1388); AFM 4, pp 674–7, 710–13, 716–17, 726–7. 154 See above, p. 120. 155 Ann. Clonm., p. 315; AFM 4, pp 722–7. See Simms, ‘Niall Garbh II’, p. 10.

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Then in 1395, in an entry placed after Richard II’s departure in May, the annals note that Toirdelbach O’Donnell once more plundered the lands of Clann Henry Aimréid, and in a great battle captured Brian Mór, son of Henry Aimréid, and thirteen leading nobles from his army. This time it appears the Great O’Neill failed to take action and, in a desperate move to force his hand, Domnall Boc, son of Henry Aimréid, captured Niall Óc O’Neill’s wife Úna, and their son and heir, Brian Óc, and escaped with his prisoners into the English colony. Hitherto Clann Henry’s only recorded contact with the English or Anglo-Irish was the surrender of a ‘second son’ of Henry Aimréid (unnamed, perhaps Domnall Boc himself) to the English government as a hostage for the release of Niall Óc in 1390. If Domnall Boc now took refuge in eastern Ulster with MacQuillin or the Savages (a number of whom had also been handed over as hostages in 1393 for the release of Brian Óc Ó Néill),156 he would have been quite safe from pursuit by Niall Óc, who was still anxious to retain Richard II’s good-will and protection against Mortimer. If Mortimer was aware of the incident, he pursued a policy of masterly inactivity. After all, he could be expected to approve of anything that embarrassed O’Neill. Events indicate that Domnall Boc’s bold stratagem produced the desired result. In 1396, Niall Óc Ó Néill ransomed Brian Mór, son of Henry Aimréid, at great expense from O’Donnell, and then handed him back to the Clann Henry in exchange for the release of his own son.157 Relations between the Great O’Neill and his nephews, the Clann Henry, were damaged by this episode, and in 1397 Niall Óc, when raiding Tír Conaill, found the forces of O’Donnell and Clann Henry O’Neill allied against him. Next year, Clann Henry allied once more with Niall Óc against O’Donnell.158 Presumably, Clann Henry switched sides so readily because they had more interest in retaining their own border lordship than concern over whom they must acknowledge as paramount chief of the land they held. This was an attitude that threatened O’Neill with the loss of all his dominion west of Omagh. Meanwhile, in 1396 Roger Mortimer, at the head of an Anglo-Irish force that included the earls of Ormond and Kildare, invaded O’Neill’s territory, burnt the city of Armagh, cathedral and all, and ‘turned and took power over Ulster after that’.159 Although offering military resistance during the actual invasion, O’Neill refrained from any attempt at revenge. The following year, a Catalan knight came to Ireland on pilgrimage to St Patrick’s Purgatory, Lough Derg. He records meeting and conversing with Earl Roger Mortimer, at which time Mortimer advised him strongly not to risk the journey to Lough Derg ‘through the lands of savage ungoverned people whom no man should trust’. Archbishop Colton of Armagh provided the pilgrim with an escort of a hundred armed men, and obtained a letter of safe-conduct from Niall Óc. However the author continues: 156 See above, pp 137–8. 157 AFM 4, pp 740–1, 746–7. 158 AFM 4, pp 748–9, 756–7, 764–5. 159 Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 156–7; AFM 4, pp 746–7, note q.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages With the hundred armed men I went into the land of the savage Irish where King Ó Néill reigned supreme. When I had ridden some five leagues, the hundred armed men did not dare to proceed any further, for they were all great enemies. So they remained on a hill and I took my leave of them and continued on [myself]. When I had ridden a further half league or so, I met King Ó Néill’s constable with a hundred men on horseback, armed also in their manner, and I conversed with this constable. I left him then and I went to the king, who received me well.160

This account suggests an armed truce rather than a clear victory for Mortimer, but the pilgrim, who travelled across southern Ulster to Pettigo and Loch Derg between November and Christmas 1397, encountered nothing but helpfulness and welcome from the Ulster Irish and earlier, in October of the same year, Archbishop Colton himself felt conditions were peaceful enough to allow him to travel overland through mid-Ulster, to conduct a metropolitan visitation of the churches in the vacant diocese of Derry.161 The written records surviving from both these expeditions indicate an unwonted stability across the northern province, presumably reflecting the acknowledgment of clear boundaries of influence as between Mortimer and the Great O’Neill. However, the relative peace was not to last. In 1398, Earl Roger Mortimer was killed by the insurgent O’Byrnes of Wicklow.162 King Richard’s second expedition to Ireland, in 1399, to avenge his kinsman’s death, was aborted by the news that the exiled Henry, duke of Lancaster, had invaded England in his absence and claimed the throne as Henry IV. Richard hastily returned to England and was deposed, dying later in prison, on 14 February 1400. In 1399, O’Neill profited by this opportunity to assemble a great army and threaten the colonists ‘to make war upon and to destroy the whole country unless he have delivered to him his son and his cousins and other hostages that are in the Castle of Dublin’.163 The Four Masters, who are one year behind for most of their entries at this juncture, say under 1398 ‘the English and Irish of the province of Ulster (O’Donnell only excepted) went into the house of O’Neill, and gave him hostages and submission’.164 Perhaps as part of the campaign to exact the release of hostages from Dublin Castle, Clann Henry Aimréid raided Dundalk, probably in July or August 1400, but their efforts brought about a quite contrary result. 160  Carpenter, ‘The pilgrim from Catalonia’, pp 108–9. 161  William Reeves, Acts of Archbishop Colton in his metropolitan visitation of the diocese of Derry, 1397 (Dublin, 1850); J.S. Porter, ‘The metropolitan visitation of the diocese of Derry by Archbishop Colton AD1397’, UJA, 1st ser., 1 (1853), 66–78, 184–97, 232–41; J.A. Watt, ‘John Colton, justiciar of Ireland (1382) and archbishop of Armagh (1383–1404)’ in Eng. & Ire., ed. Lydon, pp 196–213, at pp 204–11. 162 O’Byrne, War, politics and the Irish of Leinster, p. 112; Johnston, ‘The interim years’, p. 190. 163 Graves, Proceedings of the king’s council, pp 262–3; Curtis and MacDowell, Irish Historical Documents, p. 68; Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 158, no. 119; 159, no. 7. 164 AFM 4, pp 756–7.

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Domnall Boc, son of Henry Aimréid, was captured by Sir John Stanley, the king’s lieutenant, and sent to England for two years, until he was finally ransomed in October or November 1402 for a quantity of gold and silver and other goods, together with the surrender of twelve hostages attended by twelve servingboys.165 Over the next thirty years it would appear time and again that Domnall Boc was regarded by the English as more amenable than his kinsmen, the sons of Niall Óc. (See above Fig. 10) Perhaps his two-year sojourn in England may have given him a better understanding of his hosts. The death of King Richard II in 1400 marked the end of an era, not only for England, where the change to the Lancastrian dynasty was accompanied by controversy, eventually leading to prolonged civil war (the Wars of the Roses). In Ireland, the second half of the fourteenth century had been marked by a series of major expeditions from England, as the crown took positive action to reverse the decline of the Anglo-Irish colony, and the growing power and independence of the Gaelic chieftains. After 1400, the Lancastrians, preoccupied with challenges to their right to kingship, financial problems and a renewal of the Hundred Years War with France, began to rely increasingly on the great AngloIrish lords to govern their lordship of Ireland. In turn, the leading Anglo-Irish families, first the Butlers and later the Fitzgeralds, tried to monopolize control of the administration, and to suppress dissent by, among other measures, encouraging their allies among the Gaelic chieftains to invade the lands of their opponents. This was an old and tried tactic in feuds between powerful AngloIrish lords,166 but when exercised by chief governors of Ireland, to punish political opposition to their rule from otherwise loyal Anglo-Irish citizens, it potentially transformed both the relationship between the Dublin government and Gaelic chieftains, exemplified by the late fifteenth-century Geraldine régime’s alliance with the Great O’Neills of Tír Eógain, and also undermined what should have been a relationship of trust between the English crown and the chief governors in Ireland.

165 AFM 4, pp 764–7 (misdated to 1399, whereas a number of other entries under this year are dated to 1400 by the Annals of Ulster, and the Anglo-Irish records favour the latter date); Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 166, no. 244; 176, no. 152; Cal. pat. rolls, 1401–5, p. 183; Cal. close rolls, 1399–1402, p. 342; Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., p. 340. The hostages seem to have included Domnall Boc’s own son, his brother Áed, and a son of Maguire, king of Fermanagh, see below, p. 154. 166 Compare the behaviour of Sir Henry de Mandeville the elder, above, pp 102–3.

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CHAPTER

5

The fifteenth century: ‘a balance of power’? Gaelic and Anglo-Irish paramount lordships

R E V O LT I N E A S T U L S T E R

The fifteenth century opened with a crisis for the Anglo-Irish colonists in eastern Ulster. The death of Roger Mortimer in 1398 meant that responsibility for the earldom of Ulster had reverted once more to royal officials during the long minority of his seven-year-old son, Edmund Mortimer (see above Fig. 14). As happened before in the late thirteenth century, there are signs of friction between the crown administration and the colonists. In eastern Ulster, the Savage family of county Down were initially passed over for the office of seneschal of the liberty by the new Lancastrian regime in favour of Sir Gilbert Halsale (appointed May 1400) and Sir Walter Bitterley (appointed November 1402), each of whom was empowered to act with full authority as deputy for the king’s lieutenant of Ireland within the liberty of Ulster.1 This may have reflected doubt of the previous office-holders’ loyalty to the new king, Henry IV, since a number of the uprisings in England against the Lancastrian take-over had referred to the Mortimer claim to the English throne.2 In October 1401, and again in August 1402, the Irish chancery rolls refer to rebels among the Ulster colonists, in the phrase ‘all the king’s rebels and enemies, Scots, Irish and English in Ulster’.3 Henry IV, already beset at home by rebellions in Wales and elsewhere, dispatched one of his own sons, Prince Thomas of Lancaster, to govern the island as king’s lieutenant. The prince was a mere thirteen years old when he first took office, and his government was chronically under-funded. The actual business of governing fell largely to his deputy-lieutenant, Stephen Lescrope. When Lescrope suddenly absented himself in February 1404, leaving no official substitute, the Anglo-Irish Great Council elected James Butler, 3rd earl of Ormond, as their justiciar, with an emphasis on his military responsibilities, primarily in relation to Ulster.4 From this point onwards the fifteenth century was to be marked by the everincreasing influence of a succession of powerful Anglo-Irish chief governors of Ireland on events in Ulster. The 3rd earl of Ormond was succeeded by his more 1 Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 157, nos. 71–2; p. 172, nos. 16, 21. 2 Simms, ‘The Ulster revolt of 1404’. 3 Dublin, National Archives, Lodge MS, ‘Articles with Irish chiefs, denizations etc.’ [1A 53 66], p. 215; Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 160, no. 8; p. 165, no. 207. 4 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 341–4.

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famous and influential son, James Butler, the 4th or ‘White’ earl of Ormond, who made masterly use of both the authority derived from his frequent terms of office as head of the king’s council in Ireland, and his nexus of alliances and marital connections with the Irish chiefs, to mould the course of events in the interest of consolidating his own position in power, and at the same time strengthening the colony. However the enduring hatred, and opposition to his rule, emanating from the English-born Sir John Talbot and other members and adherents of the Talbot family, who constantly alternated with Ormond and his supporters in control of the Anglo-Irish administration throughout the first half of the century, prevented the ‘White Earl’ from attaining the even more extensive authority that later came to be exercised virtually island-wide by the 8th and 9th earls of Kildare, Gerald Mór (d.1513) and Gerald Óc (d.1534) Fitzgerald. The struggle for control between the Talbot and Ormond factions generated a multitude of written complaints and appeals from both sides to the king and his council in England. Reading through these, one can argue that they show a contrast between the two groups’ approach to dealing with the Gaelic chieftains living beyond the area ruled by common law. By 1400, a new element had entered the political scene in eastern Ulster. In 1389, the seneschal Edmund Savage had been granted wardship and marriage rights over Elizabeth and Marjorie, daughters and heiresses of Hugh Byset, last of his name to be Lord of the Glens of Antrim.5 Robert Savage had already contracted marriage with Christiana, sister of Domnall MacDonald, lord of the Isles, in 1388. At some time after 1396 and before 1400, Edmund’s ward, the heiress Marjorie Byset, was married to Eóin Mór MacDonald of Islay, younger brother of Domnall, lord of the Isles.6 The Savage family presumably hoped the Scots would prove powerful allies in the Anglo-Irish colony’s struggle against reconquest by their Gaelic-Irish neighbours. However the deposition of Richard II was followed by an invasion of Scotland by Henry IV in August 1400, and the year 1400 also saw a naval battle take place in Strangford Lough between the Scots and the constable of Dublin Castle.7 Anglo-Scottish peace negotiations failed in October 1401, and from the winter of 1401–2 the Scots court sponsored a pretender, Thomas Ward, ‘the Mammet King’ (d.1419), who was alleged to be King Richard II, escaped from his prison at Pontefract. The chronicler Androw of Wyntoun claimed that Marjorie Byset, heiress of the Glens, who had met Richard II on his 1394–5 visit to Ireland, identified the pretender as genuine when he first appeared at the court of the Lord of the Isles.8 Nevertheless, on 5 Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 146, no. 198. 6 Simon Kingston, Ulster and the Isles in the fifteenth century: the lordship of the Clann Domhnaill of Antrim (Dublin, 2004), pp 50–1, esp. notes 105–6. 7 A.D.M. Barrell, Medieval Scotland (Cambridge, 2000), pp 148–9; [James Ware], ‘Henry Marleburrough’s Chronicle of Ireland’, in Ancient Irish histories 2 (Dublin, 1809), p. 17. 8  F.J. Amours, The original chronicle of Androw of Wyntoun (6 vols, Edinburgh, London,

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5 July 1402, Marjorie’s husband, Eoin Mór MacDonald ‘Lord of the Glynnys’, agreed by indenture to be liegeman to Henry IV, rendering service for his lordship of the Glens and other lands in Ulster, as long as the lordship of Ulster should be in the hands of the king or his heirs.9 It is to be presumed that this slightly sinister proviso referred merely to the royal custody of Ulster during the young earl’s minority. Then, in 1404, the annals tell us: the Galls [Anglo-Irish] were driven from the whole province [of Ulster] and the North was burned, including lay and church property, and the monasteries – Downpatrick, Inis Draighin [?Rams Island], and Coleraine – were despoiled and demolished by Mac Aonghusa, Mac Giollamhuire and by Scotsmen.10 The English and Anglo-Irish records add that, in 1403, the town of Carrickfergus was burned to the ground,11 and that the seneschal of Ulster, Sir Walter Bitterly, ‘a right valiant knight’, was killed in battle. Yet the eventual outcome benefited the Ulster settler aristocracy. In 1405, Edmund fitz Edmund Savage was granted lands formerly held by his father, late seneschal of Ulster, because they were ‘wasted by the Irish and Scotch rebels and the king’s lieges have been removed therefrom’.12 The reference to the Scots as ‘rebels’ suggests that the followers of the MacDonald lord of the Glens of Antrim are intended. With the help of the 3rd earl of Ormond a remnant of the colonists were reinstated.13 Edmund fitz Edmund Savage was appointed seneschal of Ulster in January 1404, and Robert White became chancellor and treasurer of the liberty about the same date.14 (See Fig. 18) Another local magnate who was restored to power at this time, in a reversal of the Lancastrian administration’s previous policies, was James White, the son of the former keeper of peace for county Louth, Sir Geoffrey White. In July 1403, Sir James was pardoned all treasons, including the murder of John Dowdall, sheriff of Louth, and he and his associates, Christopher White, Stephen Gernon and Bartholomew de Verdon, had their lands and possessions restored in January 1405. In 1410, James son of Geoffrey White was licensed to foster his sons and [1902–14]), 6, p. 390; Philip Morgan, ‘Henry IV and the shadow of Richard II’ in R.E. Archer (ed.), Crown, government and people in the fifteenth century (Stroud, 1995), pp 1–31, at pp 9– 10; Kingston, Ulster and the Isles, p. 50 note 100. 9 The text of Eoin Mór’s submission is recorded in London College of Arms MS, William Lynch: ‘Repertory of Irish Memoranda Rolls’, vol. iv, p. 33 (for which reference I thank Kenneth Nicholls), and in Dublin, National Archives, J.F. Ferguson’s ‘Repertory to the Memoranda Rolls’, ii (Hen. IV and Hen. V), p. 54 (for which reference I thank Dorothy Johnston). 10 Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 172–3 (AD1404). 11 Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 170, no. 74. 12 [Ware], ‘Henry Marleburrough’s Chronicle’, p. 18 (AD1403); London PRO SC 1/57/69; Cal. pat. rolls, 1405–8, p. 88. 13 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., p. 344; London PRO SC 6/1/57/69; [Charles McNeill (ed.)], ‘Lord Chancellor Gerrard’s Notes of his Report on Ireland’, Anal. Hib., 2 (1931), 93–291: 206–8. 14 Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 177, no. 54; p. 180, no. 24.

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The fifteenth century: ‘a balance of power’? The Savage family Sir Robert Savage, Seneschal of Ulster fl.1334–d.1360

Sir Edmund Savage (‘son of Robert’) Seneschal of Ulster fl.1385–98

Sir Henry Savage fl.1360–83

Robert Savage (m. Christiana MacDonald 1387)

Edmund fitz Edmund Savage, Seneschal of Ulster fl.1404–5

Patrick Savage Seneschal of Ulster pre-1413 (sl. by Adam MacGilmore 1404?)

Richard Savage (sl. by Adam MacGilmore 1404) Robert Savage fl.1433–48

Janico Savage Seneschal of Ulster 1452–68, (d.1468) ‘captain of his nation’

Patrick Óc Savage Seneschal of Ulster fl.1470, expelled by O’Neill and the Whites

Fig 18 Some familial connections in the Savage family. Dotted or absent lines indicate lack of documented connections. Seneschals of Ulster in boldface, nickname in italics.

The White family Sir Geoffrey White of Carlingford fl. 1366 sl. by Niall Óc O’Neill 1392

Sir James fitz Geoffrey White fl.1402–48 Seneschal of Ulster 1414, 1417, 1425, 1426 Constable of Carrickfergus 1427

Lewis

Christopher

John

Patrick Seneschal of Ulster 1470

Edmund White Constable of Greencastle & Carlingford 1469

Fig. 19 The White family of Louth and the Dufferin], fourteenth-fifteenth centuries. Missing lines indicate lack of documented connection. Seneschals of Ulster in boldface.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages The Magennis kings of Uí Echach (barony of Iveagh, Co. Down) Echmilid Magennis Kg, fl. 1315

Muirchertach Riaganach Kg of Uí Echach, sl. 1349 (by brothers/kinsmen)

Gilla Riabach

Art sl. 1360 (by sons of Savage & sons of Muirchertach Riaganach)

Ruaidri Kg, sl. 1401 by sons of Cú Ulad O’Neill & by bro. Cathbarr

Art na Madmann Kg 1360, imprisoned 1380 d.1383

Cathbarr

Cú Ulad heir to lordship of Uí Echach sl. 1453

Áed Kg 1407–24 allied to Savages

Muirchertach Óc Kg fl. 1395, sl. 1399 (by kin)

Cú Ulad ‘heir to kgshp’ sl. 1396 (by English)

a son, allied 1407 to sons of Cú Ulad O’Neill

Ruaidri, Kg 1424–6 sl. by Brian Magennis

Art, Kg fl. 1427-49 submitted to duke of York 1449

Áed Kg

ꜜ ꜜ (Hugh, 1st Viscount Iveagh)

Fig 20 Selective genealogy of Magennis kings of Uí Echach fourteenth–fifteenth centuries, with some indications of their alliances. Kings in boldface, nicknames in italics, broken lines suggest undocumented links, arrows indicate missing generations.

daughters with Muirchertach, son of Cú Ulad Rúad O’Neill, or with any other O’Neill, Irish enemies of the king in the marches of Louth, to treat with them and enter relations of gossipred (godparenthood) to the king’s profit. Eventually, in 1414–15, he was made seneschal of Ulster, in succession to Patrick Savage15 (see Fig. 19). This return to reliance on local men and local methods paid off. In December 1406, Primate Fleming of Armagh mentioned that war had recently arisen between the new Magennis chief, Áed son of Art Magennis, and the sons of Cú Ulad Rúad O’Neill.16 The sons of Cú Ulad apparently supported the claims of Áed’s cousin, a son of the late chief Muirchertach Óc Magennis. In 1407, they allied with another of the rebels, Adam MacGilmore, and drove Áed Magennis 15 Cal. pat. rolls, 1401–5, pp 242, 481; Cal. pat. rolls, 1405–8, pp 284, 294; Dublin, National Archives, Record Commission calendar of memoranda roll, 2 Hen. V, RC 8/34 pp 3, 11, 14, 320, 459. 16 Smith, Reg. Fleming, no. 35, pp 30–1.

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from his territory, forcing him to seek refuge with the Savages of county Down. Together, Magennis and the Savages turned on his pursuers, defeated them roundly and killed Adam MacGilmore, who with his son Áed was chiefly blamed by the colonists for the worst excesses of the recent uprising. The following year, in 1408, we are told the Savage family killed Áed son of Adam MacGilmore while he sought sanctuary in one of the churches of Carrickfergus that he had previously desecrated.17 With Áed Magennis re-established in the kingship of Uí Echach as an ally of the Savages, eastern Ulster seems to have won a few precious years of peace (see Fig. 20). It is noticeable that neither the O’Neills of Tír Eógain nor even the O’Neills of Clandeboy in south Antrim are mentioned in connection with the disturbances in eastern Ulster. They had their own preoccupations.

T H E O ’ N E I L L S U C C E S S I O N S T RU G G L E A N D R I S E O F N I A L L GARB O’DONNELL

Until November 1402, as mentioned at the close of chapter 4 above, the Clann Henry Aimréid O’Neill were temporarily weakened by the imprisonment of their leader, Domnall Boc, in England. During this pause in their activities, the king of Tír Eógain, Niall Óc O’Neill, and the king of Tír Conaill, Toirdelbach ‘of the Wine’ O’Donnell, made peace with each other, O’Donnell finally recognizing O’Neill’s overlordship, according to the account in the Annals of Ulster. Subsequently, O’Donnell turned to attack his former allies, the troublesome border lordship of Clann Henry, and killed their deputy leader, Brian Mór son of Henry Aimréid O’Neill. The subsequent release of Domnall Boc that year by the English led to civil war in Tír Eógain,18 and may have been intended to do so. Then, in 1403, Niall Óc O’Neill, ‘high-king of Ulster’, died. At first, this did not cause a gap in continuity of lordship, since his eldest son and heir, Brian Óc, had been campaigning by his father’s side since at least 1393. However a few months later, Brian Óc also died unexpectedly from small-pox, and their opponent Domnall Boc, son of Henry Aimréid, stepped in to have himself inaugurated as ‘king of the Irish of Ulster’,19 or, as the English termed him, ‘the Great Ó Néill’20 (above, Fig. 10). As might have been expected, Niall Óc’s younger son, Eógan O’Neill, raised strong objections to what he saw as usurpation by Domnall Boc. Eógan’s earliest 17 AFM 4, pp 794–7; [Ware], ‘Henry Marleburrough’s Chronicle’, pp 19–21, 23. 18 Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 166–7; AU 3, pp 44–9 (AD1401, 1402); AFM 4, pp 764–73 (The chronology is that of the Annals of Ulster, as the Four Masters date events one year earlier around this period). 19 AU 3, pp 50–3 (AD1403, 1404); Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 170–1; AFM 4, pp 774–7. 20 Henry Ellis (ed.), Original letters illustrative of English history, 2nd ser., 1 (London, 1827), p. 59. This phrase, which does not appear to have an Irish equivalent, was already being used

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associations were with the Maguire dynasty of Fermanagh,21 perhaps because it was originally intended that he should rule in western Tír Eógain as tánaiste or deputy to his elder brother Brian Óc, the position Henry Aimréid had once held in relation to his elder brother, Niall Óc. Additionally, Eógan was married to Caiterfhína, the daughter of Ardgal MacMahon, king of Airgialla (1402–16),22 and was able to count on the political support of both Ardgal himself, and his son and heir Brian MacMahon, who succeeded him (1416–42) (see above Fig. 16). In addition, the interest Clann Henry had shown in retaking their western borderlands along the valley of the river Finn from the O’Donnells meant that Toirdelbach ‘of the Wine’ and his son and heir Niall Garb (‘N. the Rough’) O’Donnell were opposed to the succession of Domnall Boc to kingship of the whole of Tír Eogain. The succession struggle in Tír Eogain was to drag on with little intermission until Domnall Boc’s death in 1432, crippling the power of both claimants and allowing an expansion in the influence and territory of their neighbours to the east and west. In 1410, Brian MacMahon captured his nominal overlord, Domnall Boc O’Neill, and handed him over to Eógan O’Neill, who placed him in the custody of Maguire.23 The advantage Eógan thus gained over Clann Henry was not to last long. In 1412, another brother, Áed son of Henry Aimréid, who had been imprisoned in Dublin as a hostage for Domnall Boc, escaped, bringing his fellow-hostages with him, and set the province in an uproar, demanding the release of his brother from the allied forces of Eógan O’Neill, Maguire, MacMahon and O’Donnell.24 By 1414, the Clann Henry succeeded in capturing Eógan himself, there was an exchange of prisoners and, for the time being, Domnall Boc was again recognized as king.25 Domnall Boc took back the reins of power just in time to meet a major English expedition into Ulster. The death of Henry IV in March 1413, and the succession of his militant son Henry V to the English throne, had been reflected in the appointment of seasoned English military leaders to the chief governorship of Ireland to replace Prince Thomas of Lancaster and his AngloIrish deputies. Both Sir John Stanley, who died suddenly on 18 January 1414, and his successor, Sir John Talbot, Lord Furnival, had served with King Henry V while he was still prince of Wales, during the rebellion of Owain Glyndwr.26

by Richard II in 1395 of both Niall Mór and Niall Óc (see above, p. 140). It presumably served to distinguish the O’Neill ruler of Tír Eógain from the leader of Clann Áeda Buide in south Antrim. 21 AU 3, pp 42–3 (AD1399); AFM 4, pp 792–3. 22 AU 3, pp 104–5 (AD1427). 23 Ann. Conn., pp 406–7; AU 3, pp 58–9 (AD1410); AFM 4, pp 800–1. Domnall Boc was originally married to Gormlaith, the sister of King Tomás Maguire, but he subsequently divorced her, presumably in the light of Maguire’s change of allegiance. See Chart, Reg. Swayne, pp 125–6. 24 AFM 4, pp 808–9. 25 Ann. Conn., pp 420–1; AU 3, pp 66–7 (AD1414); AFM 4, pp 816–17. 26 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 346–8; C.T. Allmand, Henry V (London, 1992), pp 26 note 39, 36; J.L. Kirby, Henry IV of England (London, 1970), p. 214.

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Stanley began his term of office in Ireland briskly, by widespread and largely unpaid purveyance of provisions for his army from all the inhabitants of the lordship, both laymen and clerics, including a notoriously vindictive bardic poet in Westmeath, Niall Ó hUiginn, whose versified maledictions were popularly supposed to have hastened the lord lieutenant’s demise.27 Sir John Talbot, his successor, continued these ‘extortions and oppressions’, arousing the ire of the Anglo-Irish taxpayers, whose complaints were voiced principally through the young James Butler, 4th earl of Ormond, marking the beginning of a feud, between the Talbot and Ormond factions that was to last until 1447.28 The origins of this prolonged enmity seem to have lain in Talbot’s seizure of Ormond’s lands in 1417 over debts owed to the crown,29 but it developed into a power struggle for control of the Anglo-Irish administration between two factions. The Englishborn Talbots and their supporters exhibited a much more abrasive attitude towards the Gaelic Irish, where Ormond’s party favoured negotiations, alliances, the exchange of hostages, and were not above using the military activities of Gaelic chieftains to bolster their own claims to power. These were methods that became in time notoriously effective when employed later in the century by the Geraldine earls. Sir John Talbot’s supporters were quick to write to the English Council in defence of their leader, chronicling his far-ranging campaigns against Irish enemies.30 The most spectacular of his achievements took place in 1415. After repeated invasions of O’More (Ó Morda)’s territory in Laois, he forced this midland chief to submit, surrender his son as hostage, and bring two battalions on foot and on horse to join Talbot’s hosting against MacMahon of Monaghan. The problem with MacMahon seems to have centred round the border lordship of Farney (Ir. Fernmag) in the modern county Monaghan, which had been handed over by Ralph Pipard to the crown in 1302, and more recently had been farmed out by Prince Thomas of Lancaster to Echaid son of Philip Rúad MacMahon in December 1401, when Echaid’s father was still the reigning king of Airgialla.31 However, as in Tír Eogain, a succession struggle developed when King Philip Rúad MacMahon had been succeeded not by his son Echaid, but by his brother, Ardgal MacMahon, whose claim may have been strengthened by being father-in-law to Eógan O’Neill. War broke out in 1406 between the 27 Ann. Conn., pp 422–3; Early Statutes I, pp 568–9. See Katharine Simms, ‘Bards and barons: the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and the native culture’ in Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (eds), Medieval frontier societies (Oxford, 1989), pp 177–97, at pp 184–5. 28 Ann. Conn., pp 424–5; Harris Nicolas, Proceedings and ordinances of the privy council of England, 10 Ric. II–33 Hen. VIII (7 vols, London, 1834–7), 2, pp 43–52; Early Statutes I, pp 563ff.; M.C. Griffith, ‘The Talbot–Ormond struggle, 1414–1447’, IHS, 2 (1940–1), 376–97. Perhaps significantly the AU and Ann. Conn. note the arrival of Talbot and his entourage as ‘Saxons’, that is, Englishmen of England rather than Anglo-Irish. 29 David Beresford, ‘Butler, James (c.1390–1452), 4th earl of Ormond’ in DIB, 2, pp 126–7. 30 Ellis, Original letters, 2nd ser., 1, pp 53–63. 31 Smith, Colonization and conquest, p. 95; E.P. Shirley, Some account of the

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MacMahons and their Anglo-Irish neighbours. The little town of Louth was burned down by them, and the inhabitants fled in terror.32 In 1407, it seems the royal castle of Donaghmoyne in Farney, now said to be ‘situated amongst the Irish enemies’, was granted out to Echaid’s brother Cúchonnacht son of Philip Rúad MacMahon, to hold on behalf of the English king.33 Then, in 1414, the annals record that Ardgal’s son and heir, Brian MacMahon, captured his cousin Echaid – the Four Masters add this was done with the help of the English34 – after which Farney came under the rule of Ardgal’s younger son Magnus MacMahon. Local tradition in the early seventeenth century recounted that Magnus demanded black-rent or protection-money from the inhabitants of county Louth, and built his stronghold at Lurgan (near Carrickmacross) with the forced labour of Anglo-Irish hostages.35 If the English had indeed helped to bring about the transfer of Farney to the brothers Brian and Magnus, they were quickly to repent this decision. In 1415, Sir John Talbot, Lord Furnival, fought a long campaign against Brian MacMahon, forcing him to submit and make peace, to release English prisoners without ransom, and to send a large force with his brother Magnus to join Talbot’s expedition against O’Connor Faly (Ó Conchobair Failge) in Offaly. Talbot had initially compelled O’Hanlon of south Armagh to bring troops (over 300 men, according to Furnival’s supporters) to join his attacks on MacMahon. When O’Hanlon subsequently rebelled again, Lord Furnival not only inflicted destructive raids on his territory, but cut an enormous pass through the forest of the Fews mountains ‘in breadth of two leagues or more’. We are told the Ulster chiefs were so alarmed to see themselves temporarily deprived of the natural defences they had come to rely on, that not only did O’Hanlon sue for peace and deliver hostages in guarantee of future good behaviour, but he was joined by offers of submission from Domnall Boc O’Neill, ‘pretendinge himselfe to bee kinge of the Irish in Ulster’, Brian Ballach (‘B. the Freckled’) O’Neill, chief of the Clandeboy O’Neills, Magennis, Maguire and even O’Donnell, ‘greate and powerfull cheifetaynes of their nation’.36 By 1416, the now liberated but exiled Echaid MacMahon was a pampered guest of the community of county Louth, inconveniently billeted on the inhabitants with his concubines, his children and their nurses.37 However in August 1415, the Hundred Years War between France and England broke out once more. Lord Furnival found that both the attention of the English government, and the necessary finance for his military retinue and even his own salary were diverted elsewhere. His later campaigns until he left territory or dominion of Farney (London, 1845), pp 19–20. 32 Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 180, no. 13. 33 Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 187, no. 12. The entry was partially illegible, and Tresham left a blank for the actual name of the castle in Farney. 34 Ann. Conn., pp 422–3; AFM 4, pp 818–19. 35  Seosamh Ó Dufaigh (ed.), ‘Cíos Mhic Mhathghamhna’, Clogher Record, 4 (1962), 125–33: 128. 36 Ellis, Original letters, 2nd ser., 1, pp 58–9. 37 Nicolas, Proceedings and

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Ireland, in 1419 or early in 1420, were on a smaller scale and less successful, and he was dogged by opposition to his rule from the Anglo-Irish supporters of the young 4th earl of Ormond.38 His next expedition northwards in 1418 was to end in defeat. The disturbances this time were province-wide. In 1417, Domnall Boc, son of Henry Aimréid O’Neill, had felt sufficiently secure in his position as king of Tír Eógain to launch an attack on Toirdelbach ‘of the Wine’s younger son Nechtain O’Donnell, who had built himself a stronghold on the border of the disputed territory of western Cenél Múáin, at Carnglas, between Raphoe and Donaghmore (county Donegal).39 Domnall Boc’s invasion brought on a counterattack by Toirdelbach ‘of the Wine’s eldest son and heir, Niall Garb O’Donnell, by now ruling as effective king of Tír Conaill on behalf of his elderly father. In 1418, Niall Garb brought his army on a plundering raid into Tír Eógain and expelled Domnall Boc from his own territory, forcing him to seek refuge east of the Bann with the Anglo-Irish chief, MacQuillin.40 This event may have provoked another war that took place that year between ‘Mac Uí Néill Buide and the Scots and the English of Ulaid and the Route [of MacQuillin]’41 Although the wording of the entry is rather ambiguous, it appears the Scots were allied to O’Neill of Clandeboy in opposition to the Anglo-Irish settlers on this occasion. Neither Domnall MacDonald, Lord of the Isles (d.c.1420), nor his younger brother, Eóin MacDonald, lord of Dunyveg and the Glens of Antrim (d.1427), were unquestioning adherents of Scottish royal policy. In 1407 and 1408, they had received offers of alliance from King Henry IV, conveyed by the bishop of Down and the entrepreneurial ‘Gascon squire’ Janico Dartas, who had first acquired lands and interests in Ireland under Richard II. In 1410, when Ireland was being rather permissively governed by Thomas Butler, prior of Kilmainham, as Prince Thomas of Lancaster’s deputy, Janico Dartas had even received licence to marry his son and daughter to a daughter and son of Eóin MacDonald.42 However there is no clear evidence that the proposed alliance of the lord of the Isles with the English king was actually concluded, and when the Hundred Years War broke out again in 1415, the Scots under their regent Albany were allied to France. Border raids began in July 1415, and in 1417 Albany had mounted an unsuccessful siege of the town of Berwick.43 ordinances of the privy council, 2, pp 49–50. 38 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 349–57; Art Cosgrove, ‘Chief governors, 1169–1534’ in NHI 9, pp 469–85, at p. 483 note 75. 39 AFM 4, pp 832–3. 40 Ann. Conn., pp 438–9; AFM 4, pp 834–5. 41 AFM 4, pp 836–7. 42 R.W. Munro and Jean Munro (eds), Acts of the lords of the Isles, 1336–1493 (Edinburgh, 1986), p. lxxvi; Kingston, Ulster and the Isles, pp 43–4, 52, 60, 166; Edmund Curtis, ‘Janico Dartas, Richard the Second’s “Gascon Squire”: his career in Ireland, 1394–1426’, JRSAI, 62 (1933), 182–205. It may be noted that 1410 was also the year James White was licensed to foster his children with the sons of Cú Ulad Ó Néill (above, p. 152). 43 Allmand, Henry V, p. 341; Ranald Nicholson, Scotland, the later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1974), pp 248–9.

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The third military encounter in eastern Ulster during 1418 was Lord Furnival’s second expedition northwards, which inflicted a series of punitive raids on Áed son of Art Magennis, lord of Uí Echach (barony of Iveagh, south Down), but Brian Ballach O’Neill of Clandeboy joined Magennis to defeat and kill many of the English troops, and recapture much of the cattle seized.44 It is significant that Brian Ballach (d.1425), leader of the Clandeboy O’Neills in succession to his unassuming father, Muirchertach (d.1395), had been described by the Irish Council in 1417 as a ‘great and powerful chieftain’. The succession struggle in Tír Eógain left the Clandeboy O’Neills without an effective overlord, free to develop a local paramount authority over the other Irish chiefs east of the Bann, principally MacGilmore and Magennis, just as in the west we are told the O’Donnell dynasty annexed two cantreds of Tír Eógain from the O’Neills during their civil war.45 Instead of the province-wide kingdom of Ulster that had been the great goal of Domnall O’Neill of the Bruce invasion (d.1325), as well as that of his son Áed Remor, his grandson Niall Mór and his great-grandson Niall Óc O’Neill, the fifteenth century was to see authority over the northern province split three ways – between O’Donnell, the Great O’Neill of Tír Eógain and the O’Neill of Clandeboy (see Fig. 10 and Plate X). In these circumstances, successive ‘Great O’Neills’ of Tír Eógain began to turn to sympathetic leaders of the Anglo-Irish colony for military support in reclaiming authority over their neighbours in Ulster. While their appeals for assistance were normally successful, since it was in the government’s interest to make the Great O’Neill progressively more dependent on Anglo-Irish support, it was not in the interest of the colony that O’Neill should succeed in reestablishing a province-wide authority in Ulster, such as had made Niall Óc O’Neill so formidable at the end of the fourteenth century. The balancing out of one power in Ulster against another, during the first half of the fifteenth century, was to be orchestrated to a considerable extent by James Butler, the 4th earl of Ormond. To do this, however, he had first to dismember what he described as ‘a confederation under oath among the Irish against the king, his lieutenant or the [earl of Ulster for the time being]’.46 Although there is a difference of emphasis between entries in the Annals of Ulster and the Four Masters’ account, the moving spirit behind such a confederation, if indeed it existed, appears to have been Niall Garb II O’Donnell, son of Toirdelbach ‘of the Wine’, the real ruler of Tír Conaill from about 1418 onwards, even though his elderly father did not retire until 1422. 44 Ann. Conn., pp 438–9; AFM 4, pp 834–5. 45 Aithd., 1, p. 84; 2, p. 50; AFM 4, pp 868–9. See Katharine Simms, ‘Niall Garbh II O’Donnell, king of Tír Conaill, 1422–39’, Donegal Annual, 12:1 (1977), 7–21: 11–12. 46 [Irish Record Commission], Reports of the commissioners … respecting the public records of Ireland, Reports 1–5, 1810–15 (London, 1815–25), 1, p. 55. This is the text of an indenture between the earl of Ormond as king’s lieutenant and Eógan O’Neill drawn up in July 1425, when the earl of Ulster in question was the duke of York, then

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Niall Garb II is one of the few Ulster chieftains for whom we have enough evidence to form some opinion of his character. Reckless, even heedless, bravery in battle are indicated not only by the praise-poems in his honour, but by actual incidents recorded by the annals. For example, in 1420, he and a brother, Domnall O’Donnell, interrupted their blockade against an O’Conor of Sligo to hold a wine-feast, apparently because an English merchant ship had just arrived with a cargo of wine in the harbour. The O’Conors learned of this and attacked in the midst of the banquet, killing Prince Domnall, while Niall only escaped death by swimming out to the English merchant’s ship.47 A year or two later, he was again near death, when: Being over-eager, he did not wait for his followers. While he had not troops equal in number to the Goill [Anglo-Irish] of Meath, and the king’s army, he charged them; his men had to fight an unequal combat. The wounding of Niall Garb son of Toirdelbach in the battle-front only roused his wild courage in the fray.48 At the same time Niall Garb had political ambitions that extended far beyond the immediate borders of Tír Conaill, to encompass all Ulster, as the probable instigator of the sworn conspiracy of Ulster chiefs alluded to by the earl of Ormond, while his marriage to the daughter of O’Conor Faly of Offaly suggests a wish to ally with Irish leaders further south who were also warring against the colonists. A poet remarked that his subjects in Tír Conaill resented the heavy taxation he imposed on them to finance the hire of mercenary soldiers in pursuit of his aims.49 A praise-poem addressed to Niall Garb at the height of his career, not only credits him with expelling Domnall Boc, the Great O’Neill, from his kingdom of Tír Eógain to seek refuge with MacQuillin, but adds that when O’Neill with the support of MacQuillin came back to attack Tír Conaill he suffered another devastating defeat, and that altogether Niall Garb undertook three invasions of MacQuillin’s Route (north Antrim) at this time.50 The Annals of Connacht and the Four Masters, while formally recognizing the elderly Toirdelbach ‘of the Wine’ O’Donnell as leader rather than his son and co-ruler Niall Garb, agree in recording repeated expulsions of King Domnall Boc son of Henry Aimréid O’Neill in 1418, 1419 and 1420, adding that on one occasion he was expelled not to MacQuillin and the Ulster colonists, but to the territory of the O’Conors of a boy of thirteen. See below, p. 164. 47 Lambert McKenna (ed.), ‘Some Irish bardic poems XCIV: Leasg an aghaidhsi’, Studies (1950), 187–92; AU 3, pp 84–5; AFM 4, pp 842–5 (AD1420). 48 Simms, ‘Niall Garbh II’, 13–14, 18; Katharine Simms, ‘Images of warfare in bardic poetry, Celtica, 21 (1990), 608–19: 609–10; Aithd., 2, p. 51. 49 Simms, ‘Niall Garb II’, 17–18; J.G. O’Keeffe (ed.), ‘Poems on the O’Donnells’, Ir. Texts II, pp 46, 49, verses 5, 28, 33. 50 Aithd., 1, p. 84; 2, p. 50, verses 15–20.

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Sligo,51 a line of chieftains already claimed as subordinate allies of the Great O’Neill in 1395, in a letter written by Niall Óc O’Neill to Richard II52 (see Plate IX). The Annals of Ulster compress these events into a series of entries for 1419: Great war [arose] this year between Ua Neill, namely Domnall, son of Henry Ua Neill, and Eogan, son of Niall Ua Neill junior, that is, the future arch-king of Ulster [adhbur airdrigh Uladh]. Ua Neill was expelled in this war by Eogan and by Toirdelbach Ua Domnaill, namely, king of TirConaill and by Brian Mag Mathgamna, namely, king of Oirgialla and by Thomas Mag Uidhir, namely, king of Fir-Manach. A large host [was led] by Brian son of Domnall Ua Conchobair [Ó Conchobair of Sligo], with his caeraigecht53 {‘and all [the people of] Lower Connacht with many of the English, at the request and solicitation of O’Neill … while O’Donnell was with his forces in Tyrone’ adds the Four Masters’ account} and Murbach was burned by him, to wit, the stronghold of Ua Domnaill and all Tir-Aedha was destroyed by him on that expedition. Domnall, son of Henry Ua Neill, namely king of the Fifth of Ulster, was expelled this year by counsel of the Ulstermen under Eogan Ua Neill and he was driven to the Foreigners of Ulster with great dishonour {‘and Mac-I-Neill Boy [the O’Neill of Clandeboy] committed depredations upon him in the Glynns’ add the Four Masters}.54 A point of interest lies in the words used to describe the relations between Eógan son of Niall Óc O’Neill and O’Donnell. In the Annals of Loch Cé, Eógan is said to form a bond (ceangal) with Toirdelbach ‘of the Wine’, while the Four Masters state he pledged his friendship to him (do róine a charadradh d’urnaidhm fris). Neither phrase implies the submission of one side to the other, and both are reminiscent of the earl of Ormond’s allusion to a ‘confederation under oath amongst the Irish’. Meanwhile, in 1420, James Butler, the 4th earl of Ormond, was at last appointed king’s lieutenant in Ireland, having served with Henry V in France, and having remonstrated with the English government for some years against the policies of Sir John Talbot, Lord Furnival, and his deputies Thomas Talbot (March–June 1418) and Archbishop Richard Talbot of Dublin (July 1419–March 1420). In his first year of office Ormond received a letter from ‘the people of Ulster’, that is, the colonists of county Down, asking him to send an expedition 51 Ann. Conn., pp 454–5; AFM 4, pp 846–7. 52 Curtis, Richard II, pp 134, 214. 53 I.e., a consolidated herd of his followers’ livestock with their keepers. On the institution of the caeraigecht, see Katharine Simms, ‘Nomadry in medieval Ireland: the origins of the creaght or caoraigheacht’, Peritia, 5 (1986), 379–91. 54  AU 3, pp 78–9 (AD1419); Ann. Conn.,

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against the Irish to safeguard the future of their settlement, as his father, the 3rd earl of Ormond, had restored the Ulster colony in 1404. Ormond’s response demonstrates the contrast between his policies and Talbot’s more indiscriminate hostility towards all the Gaelic Irish, because according to the Four Masters’ account, when he had exacted submission from Magennis and the other Irish of Ulaid, he delivered their hostages to the Great O’Neill, Domnall Boc, the ally of MacQuillin, thus seeking to delegate the role of peace-keeping to a ‘trustworthy’ Gaelic ally.55 In the circumstances Domnall Boc was in no position to control the Irish of Ulaid, or even Tír Eógain itself. The writer James Yonge, when eulogizing the deeds of Ormond, speaks of renewed trouble in 1421: Oneleboy [Ó Néill Buide, O’Neill of Clandeboy], Cragfergouse and Ulvestre atte his owyn wille brandyng and wastynge … wythout delay this Erle into Oneel Boyes contrey wyth his retenue roode. Gracious esploit ther god hym sende. fro trayson hym sauyd . and this Oneel Boy wyth al the grestis enemys of Ulvestre unto pees refourmyd.56 The annals tell us that, in 1421, Eógan O’Neill was on his way to Dundalk to meet the earl, when he was captured by Brian Ballach O’Neill of Clandeboy,57 perhaps because the earl had plans to hand over the hostages of the Irish of Ulaid to Eógan this time, as the more effective of the two would-be rulers of Tír Eógain. It was to be a year before Eógan’s wife and sons managed to ransom him from Brian Ballach. The major change in 1422 was the retirement of the elderly Toirdelbach ‘of the Wine’ O’Donnell from the kingship of Tír Conaill to become a Cistercian monk in Assaroe Abbey, where he was shortly to die, enabling his son and successor Niall Garb to follow his ambitions to the full. The Four Masters have preserved two versions of O’Donnell’s campaigns in the years immediately following. In one he was part of a general coalition, in the second version he was the prime mover. According to this second stratum of entries, during Eógan O’Neill’s imprisonment Niall Garb received submission from Maguire, MacMahon, Magennis and O’Cahan, and led them on an invasion of eastern Ulster against the Clandeboy O’Neills and MacEoin Byset of the Glens, where he devastated the country, after which Eógan O’Neill’s family were enabled to ransom him from O’Neill of Clandeboy. Thereafter O’Donnell joined with Domnall Boc O’Neill and the other Ulster chiefs and plundered the Clandeboy O’Neills of the value of Eógan’s ransom. O’Neill of Clandeboy then surrendered hostages, which O’Donnell handed over to Domnall Boc, the Great O’Neill, as Ormond had done two years before. Thereafter O’Donnell led the Great O’Neill with Clann Henry Aimréid O’Neill, Eógan O’Neill with his sons, the sons of Cú pp 440–1; ALC 2, pp 146–7; AFM 4, pp 838–9. 55 London PRO SC 1/57/69; AFM 4, pp 844–5. 56 Gilbert, Facsimiles, 3, Appendix V. 57 AFM 4, pp 850–1.

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Ulad Rúad O’Neill, Maguire, MacMahon, Magennis, O’Hanlon, Brian Ballach O’Neill of Clandeboy and O’Cahan with their forces on a not very successful invasion of the O’Conors and MacDonaghs (Meic Donnchada) in Sligo. The following year this united army of Ulster chiefs ravaged county Louth and exacted black-rent from the town of Dundalk and the surrounding district.58 By this time, King Henry V of England had died (31 August 1422) leaving his kingdom of England and his claim to the kingship of France to his nine-monthold baby son, Henry VI, represented in government by a council of regency.59 The earl of Ormond had not only come to the end of his term as king’s lieutenant of Ireland, but had been summoned to England to face charges of treason lodged by his rival, Sir John Talbot, Lord Furnival, while Sir John’s brother, Archbishop Richard Talbot, was appointed justiciar of Ireland. Ormond, however, laid counter-charges of misgovernment against Furnival, and the invasion of Louth by the Ulster Irish was only one among a widespread series of raids by Irish chieftains against the colonists that erupted in Ormond’s absence, so the English parliament quashed the charges against him, and when it was decided to appoint Edmund Mortimer, earl of March and Ulster, as the new king’s lieutenant in Ireland (May 1423), Mortimer sent the earl of Ormond as his deputy to Ireland (May 1424) to bring order to the country ahead of his own arrival.60 The Anglo-Irish records confirm that Niall Garb O’Donnell was the prime mover in the united attack of the Ulster Irish on the colonists. Ormond names the enemies that face him in Ulster as MacMahon, Magennis and Niall Garb O’Donnell, without mentioning any of the dismembered branches of the O’Neills of Tír Eógain. He adds that without outside help he would be unable to restrain their malice, and he took the unusual step of purchasing the service of the hibernicized Burkes of Clanrickard (in Galway) and the citizen’s militia of Dublin as auxiliary troops.61 Since both Domnall Boc and Eógan O’Neill were now adherents of Niall Garb O’Donnell, Ormond reversed his policy towards O’Neill of Clandeboy. When he brought his reinforced army north in 1424, and invaded the plains of Armagh and Monaghan, Ormond was opposed by O’Donnell, with Domnall Boc and Eógan O’Neill, but he received assistance from Magnus MacMahon, O’Hanlon and Brian Ballach O’Neill of Clandeboy. Together Brian Ballach and Ormond expelled Áed, son of Art Magennis, chief of Uí Echach, from his territory, demolishing his castle at Lough Brickland, killing his constable of the galloglasses, and forcing the chief himself to seek refuge with the other Irish confederates.62 58 AFM 4, pp 854–9. 59 Bertram Wolffe, Henry VI (London, 1981), pp 29–33. 60 OtwayRuthven, Med. Ire., pp 361–3; Griffith, ‘The Talbot–Ormond struggle’, 379–82; Cosgrove, ‘Chief governors’, NHI 9, p. 476. 61 Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 233, nos. 15, 17. 62 AFM 4, pp 860–3. Áed Magennis died the same year and was succeeded in the chieftainship by his son

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At last, Edmund Mortimer, earl of March and Ulster, arrived in September 1424. He came with a large retinue and whether this or the preparatory warfare and diplomacy of the earl of Ormond was more influential, all the Ulster chiefs came that winter to meet March in his castle of Trim, county Meath, apart from Niall Garb O’Donnell himself, who was represented by his brother Nechtain. MacQuillin also came to offer his allegiance to the earl, but we are told he did so separately.63 This added detail not only implies that MacQuillin still saw himself as part of the Ulster colony – his name does not appear in the list of those who submitted to Niall Garb in 1422 – but it also suggests that the other Ulster chieftains arrived in a body to submit. Unfortunately for them, although they achieved an agreement with Mortimer, he suddenly died of the plague on 18 January 1425 before they had returned home, and they were all arrested and imprisoned by Sir John Talbot, who had been elected justiciar in this emergency by the king’s council in Ireland.64 MacQuillin of the Route, Domnall Boc O’Neill and Brian Ballach O’Neill of Clandeboy agreed to terms and were released almost immediately, though Brian Ballach was lynched within the year by the inhabitants of Carrickfergus, when he visited that town to drink wine, confident of his status as an Irishman at the king’s peace.65 Eógan O’Neill and Nechtain O’Donnell on the other hand were retained in custody, charged with graver crimes. However, the king’s council in England once again appointed the earl of Ormond as king’s lieutenant in Ireland, and he arrived to take up office at the end of April. Ormond decided to keep Nechtain O’Donnell in prison for a further year, before exacting an enormous ransom from Niall Garb for his brother’s release, with the surrender of many hostages including Niall Garb’s most prominent son, Toirdelbach O’Donnell, who negated this political hold over his father’s future behaviour by escaping from custody the same year, bringing four of the other hostages with him.66 Ormond’s attitude to the other Ulster Irish, however, was more conciliatory. In May 1425, he drew up an agreement at Ardee with the lord of Airgialla, Brian MacMahon, and his two brothers, Magnus and Rudraige, which gave legal recognition to their de facto occupation of the barony of Farney, provided they paid rent to its Anglo-Irish lords, while at the same time they quit-claimed and surrendered vacant possession of any lands they had taken from the colonists. Ruaidri, who was then killed by a kinsman Brian in 1426. By 1427, the ruling Magennis was Art, another son of Áed, who commenced his career as an ally of the Savage family and was still ruling in 1449 (Chart, Reg. Swayne, pp 58, 61; Gilbert, Facsimiles, 3, plate 40). This Art son of Áed son of Art Magennis was the subject of a famous praise-poem, Lámh dhearg Éireann Uí Eathach – ‘Uí Echach is Ireland’s Red Hand’ (ABM, no. 292, pp 393–4). O’Grady wrongly described this as addressed to the much later chieftain Art son of Áed son of Domnall Magennis, see O’Grady and Flower, Cat. Ir. MSS, 1, pp 395–7. 63 AU 3, pp 96–7 (AD1425). 64 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., p. 363. 65 AU 3, pp 98–9 (AD1425); Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 112– 13; Ann. Conn., pp 470–1. 66 AFM 4, pp 864–9.

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Brian MacMahon surrendered a son as a hostage to guarantee the agreement, and all three swore an oath on the gospels, thereby subjecting themselves to Ireland’s bishops, to judge in future whether they had broken their word.67 At Dundalk, in July 1425, Ormond released Eógan O’Neill, who agreed in an indenture to hand over a son as hostage, ‘voluntarily and spontaneously’ promising allegiance to the late Edmund Mortimer’s nephew, the young Richard, duke of York, as the new earl of Ulster. He agreed that he held his Irish lands as a tenant of the duke, while renouncing and surrendering vacant possession of any lands he or his subjects and adherents had occupied which had been the direct property of the duke or other Englishmen. He would render the duke the same obedience his predecessors had customarily yielded to previous earls of Ulster, he would answer a summons to war from the king or the duke with all his forces at his own expense within the bounds of Ulster, but would be supplied with provisions by the king or duke if he warred against Irish or English rebels elsewhere in Ireland. He would not plunder English lands or make unjust exactions from them of food or the payment known as ‘black-rent’ [protectionmoney]. He would enforce double compensation for any thefts or injuries carried out in the past by his adherents, and he in turn was to receive similar compensation for past injuries inflicted on him by the English. He would not harbour Irish or English rebels or receive stolen goods, and Ormond promised similarly to return any notorious thief fleeing Eógan’s dominions to seek refuge with the English. Eógan promised faithful counsel to the king and duke. He would inform on any conspiracy tending to the loss and dishonour of the king, the lieutenant or the duke of York notwithstanding any oaths of secrecy he might have taken, and if he had joined a confederation under oath among the Irish against the king, the lieutenant or the duke, it was hereby annulled. He renounced any revenge against the archbishop of Armagh, Primate John Swayne, for being involved in his capture, and would use his authority as the ‘secular arm of the church’ to support the archbishop’s administrators when they were conducting visitations and collecting dues and tithes. He promised to render all customs and exactions he or his predecessors had previously yielded to any earl of March and Ulster and in future would pay the same to such captain or officer as Ormond would appoint to receive it (which suggests that the original billeting of mercenary soldiers had been commuted under the Mortimers to a money payment). For all these undertakings Eógan swore a Gospel oath in the same terms as the MacMahon brothers, agreeing that he would owe a fine of 1,000 marks if he broke any of the above articles of agreement. Among the witnesses to this indenture were Primate John Swayne and Sir James White, seneschal of Ulster.68 67 Shirley, Some account of the territory or dominion of Farney, p. 20; Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 239, no. 118. 68 [Irish Record Commission], Reports … 1810–15, pp 54–6.

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By the mere fact of making Eógan O’Neill responsible for paying the ‘Bonaght of Ulster’, Ormond was in effect recognizing this son of Niall Óc O’Neill as the real ruler of Tír Eógain. The clause by which his membership of any confederation under oath among the Irish was to be annulled seems to have produced real results. In 1426, the Four Masters say Eógan was reconciled to his cousin, Domnall Boc, accepting his claim to the chieftainship, and then together the two leaders warred to recover the lands lost during their dissensions.69 The most significant portion of these lands would seem to have been the ‘two cantreds’ that the poet tells us Domnall Boc had handed over to Niall Garb O’Donnell,70 lands which seem to have included the crannóc or fortified island of Loch Láegaire (Lough Mary, Baronscourt, county Tyrone), where his ancestor Domnall O’Neill of the Bruce invasion had breathed his last in 1325.71 Along with the peninsula of Inishowen, this borderland of west county Tyrone and east county Donegal, once known as Mag Ítha and later defined by the rural deanery of Mohey in Derry diocese,72 was to remain a continuing bone of contention between O’Neills and O’Donnells for the entire fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. O’Donnell’s response to this breach of his alliance with the O’Neills of Tír Eógain was to bring an army across into Ulaid in 1427 to support the sons of Brian Ballach O’Neill against the invading forces of Domnall Boc O’Neill. During this campaign O’Donnell once more inflicted a severe defeat on Domnall Boc’s long-standing ally, MacQuillin of the Route.73 It is not actually stated that Niall Garb made this expedition with the acquiescence O’Cahan, whose territory of north Derry he would almost certainly have traversed, but O’Cahan had been among those who submitted to Niall Garb O’Donnell in 1422, his dynasty had a history of frontier warfare with the MacQuillins, and there is reason to believe they were also not on good terms with Domnall Boc O’Neill.74 On 20 March 1428, Sir James White, then constable of the castle of Carrickfergus, complained to the king’s council in Ireland that he been warned that O’Donnell had sent for a great multitude of Scots, which would join his own forces, and come in a short while to attack Carrickfergus.75 Such an extended geographical reach for his expeditions suggests that Niall Garb was very conscious of the old tradition which held that the ‘kingship of Ailech’, implying 69 AFM 4, pp 868–9. 70 Aithd., 1, p. 84; 2, p. 50, verse 16. 71 AU 3, pp 116–17 (AD1431); AFM 4, pp 884–5. See above, p. 115. 72 H.A. Jefferies, ‘Derry diocese on the eve of the plantation’ in Derry Hist. & Soc., pp 175–204, at p. 196. 73 AFM 4, pp 870–3. 74 Simms, ‘Tír Eoghain “North of the Mountain”’, pp 167–8. 75 Rot. Canc. Hib., pp 245–6, no. 21. White had been reappointed as seneschal of Ulster in December 1426, after a brief period when Janico Dartas held office (Cal. pat. rolls, 1422–9, pp 287, 383). As constable of Carrickfergus, he complained that he had held the castle for two years without salary, except for an inadequate 10 marks, which would not suffice to victual the castle, and the council in reply granted him merely an additional £10 in part payment of his fees and rewards.

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province-wide supremacy, should alternate between O’Neill and O’Donnell.76 Even more far-flung ambitions, favouring a coordinated rebellion against English rule between the Ulster chiefs and those from other parts of Ireland, may be indicated by Niall Garb’s marriage during the 1420s to Findguala the daughter of An Calbach O’Conor Faly, the ruler of Offaly, ‘who got [back] more of Leinster from Galls and Gaels opposing him than any man since the time of [the legendary king of Leinster] Cathair Mór’.77 Ormond’s justiciarship had terminated in July 1427, after which the post of chief governor was held by the less successful Lord Grey (August–December 1427), who departed after a few months leaving the bishop of Meath as his deputy (December 1427–July 1428). Primate Swayne lamented that the Irish were gaining power as a result of the Talbot/Ormond quarrel. He claimed that either Talbot or Ormond would manage better than their successors: ‘for in goode feyth the enmyes dredith [t]hame both more than they do all the world, I trow, for if any of [t]hame both were in this Lond, all the enmyes in Irlond wold be ryght fayn to have peese’.78 When John Sutton, Lord Dudley, arrived as the next lieutenant (September 1428–November 1429), he brought Ormond to Ireland with him. Primate Swayne rejoiced in a letter to Ormond ‘by your lordship’s virtue, many parts of Ireland which had fallen away in your absence were recovered by your advent and return’.79 During this period a safe-conduct was issued in July 1429 for Niall Garb O’Donnell to come ‘to England to do his fealty and allegiance to the king, and for his followers (famulis) who desire to do the same’.80 It would appear that Sutton and Ormond were trying to pacify Ulster by diplomacy. However, there is no evidence that O’Donnell actually went to England, and Sutton’s administration came under severe criticism from the Talbot party, who claimed that the difficulties encountered by Lord Grey arose not because of maladministration, but because the Irish enemies and English rebels were deliberately incited to burnings and other enormities by ‘certain magnates and nobles of Ireland (proceres et generosi Hiberniae)’, and that neither county nor townsmen turned out to join the lieutenant’s army against them, when summoned by the king’s writ, and that the actions of the earl of Ormond had tended to the ruin and destruction of the land, rather than its benefit.81 From May 1430 to September 1431, Archbishop Richard Talbot was put in charge,82 and Ormond went to serve in the English army in France. 76 Above pp 94–5. 77 Ann. Conn., pp 498–9. Findguala bore Niall Garb four sons. Áed Ruad, who does not seem to have been the eldest, was born about 1429 (AU 3, pp 108–9; Walsh, Beatha Aodha Ruaidh, 2, p. 170). See below p. 206, note 92. 78 Chart, Reg. Swayne, p. 111. 79 Chart, Reg. Swayne, p. 106. 80 Cal. pat. rolls, 1422–9, p. 542. 81 Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 248; Early Statutes II, pp 10–25. 82 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., p. 367; Cosgrove, ‘Chief governors’, NHI 9, p. 476. The return of the Talbot party to power in Ireland may not be unconnected with the return of Cardinal Beaufort to a seat on the council in England in

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If the Talbot party were justified in hinting that Ormond or his supporters stage-managed Irish revolts whenever their political opponents were in office, 1430 should have been a time of particularly outrageous attacks on the colony. So it was, but in Ulster the attacks were no longer made by an alliance of chiefs, a ‘federation under oath’. Eógan O’Neill was taking more and more power into his own hands as the de facto ruler of Tír Eógain. Already in 1429, he had brought the forces of MacMahon of Airgialla and Maguire of Fir Manach to support Eógan O’Reilly, lord of east Breifne (county Cavan), against the claims of a rival kinsman who was backed by O’Rourke (Ó Ruairc) of west Breifne (county Leitrim) and by the baron of Delvin, an ally of the earl of Ormond. There was a battle, which Eógan O’Neill won, even taking the baron of Delvin prisoner, and from then on he could count O’Reilly among his vassal chieftains, a development that paved the way for the future inclusion of county Cavan as part of the province of Ulster.83 Then in 1430, Eógan O’Neill invaded county Louth, burned Dundalk and other settlements and extracted ‘black-rent’, or protection-money, from the inhabitants. He made a second expedition into Longford and Westmeath, where he received submission from the local Irish chiefs, O’Conor Faly (Niall Garb O’Donnell’s father-in-law), O’Molloy (Ó Máelmúaid), O’Madden (Ó Madadáin), Mageoghegan (Mág Eochacáin) and O’Melaghlin, who joined him in burning Westmeath around Kilbixy, after which the baron of Delvin, the Plunkets, the Herberts and other Anglo-Irish landowners of western Meath submitted to Eógan’s terms to protect their lands from like treatment. Such a spectacular raid, which inflicted such minimal damage on Ormond’s allies, might suggest there was some truth in the Talbot faction’s accusations of stagemanaged Irish invasions, intended to embarrass political opponents. The AngloIrish great council, meeting in Dublin in September of that year, complained that county Dublin was now the only Anglo-Irish district not forced to pay ‘black-rent’ to some Irish chieftain, and that the Irish were reinforced ‘by grete multitude of Scottes sende unto thaym oute of Scottelond’,84 demonstrating the truth of the warning received by James White, the constable of Carrickfergus, in 1428. In 1431, Eógan was able to bring his new vassal-chief, O’Reilly, together with MacMahon and Maguire to harry the Route of MacQuillin in north Antrim. This suggests he was bidding for the allegiance of the sons of Brian Ballach O’Neill of Clandeboy, who had a long history of enmity against MacQuillin, and indeed next year Muirchertach Rúad O’Neill, the new chief of Clandeboy, joined January 1430, see Wolffe, Henry VI, pp 56–7. 83 Éamonn De hÓir (ed.), ‘Annála as Bréifne’, Breifne, 4:13 (1970), 59–86: 68; AU 3, pp 106–7 (1429); AFM 4, pp 874–7; ALC 2, pp 152–3. See above p. 33, note 2. Richard Nugent, Baron Delvin, was appointed as his deputy by the 4th earl of Ormond in 1444 (Edmund Curtis, Calendar of Ormond deeds (6 vols, Dublin, 1932– 43), 3, pp 157–9). 84 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 367–8.

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Eógan in a hosting against O’Donnell.85 In 1431, Niall Garb O’Donnell’s most prominent son, Toirdelbach, and Niall’s brother Nechtain, two potential successors to the kingdom of Tír Conaill, appeared to be in contention for possession of the lands in western Tír Eógain newly annexed from the O’Neills. The real cause of the quarrel seems to have been Nechtain’s fear that his position as tánaiste or deputy to his brother Niall Garb would not guarantee him a right of succession to the kingship of Tír Conaill in view of the martial prowess and growing prominence of Niall’s son Toirdelbach. A bardic poem addressed to Niall Garb, but quite possibly commissioned by Nechtain, reflects this anxiety: Many a king owned Ireland to whose progeny she will not belong in the future; the descendants of Créidhe will obtain a treaty – let Ireland belong to its choice of king! Rather sadly, Niall Garb’s achievements are referred to in terms of past glory: At the commencement of your reign, O king of Barnesmore, Ireland was in captivity to the English; whoever desires your inheritance, let him hesitate if he has not equalled your achievements! Even more unusually, the praise-poet unequivocally indicates that the heavy taxation imposed by Niall Garb on his own subjects to finance his military activities has stirred up discontent, though the poet justifies the expenditure in terms of the chief ’s increased ability to impose law and order internally and secure his external borders: Though the son of Toirrdelbach seems oppressive to you, his country is the better for the restraining of its evil-doers. Anything that does not please the descendant of Eochu, he has only to say ‘Avoid that’. Peace has been made with the Irish host, the threat of plunder by the English is far removed; if a cow were left out in the open for a year, it is only necessary to search for her [and she will be found].86 Nechtain O’Donnell seized what by this date is described as the ‘castle’ rather than merely the ‘crannóc’, or fortified artificial island, in Loch Láegaire (Baronscourt, county Tyrone) from his nephew Toirdelbach O’Donnell, and 85 AU 3, pp 114–17, 120–3 (AD1431, 1432). 86 ‘Imdha ri ‘ga raibe Banba . nach bia festa ac fior da shil; do-gheba Sil Creidhe comha – bidh Eri gá rogha rig … / Ar cend do rigtha a rí Bernais . do bí Eri a n-urlais Ghall; go beith nech le bud áil h’oighricht . nair muna beth h’oirbirt ann … / Ferr a crich o cosc a merlech . mac Toirrdelbaig ge trom libh; an ní nach al les o nEchaid / ni bí acht a rádh, sechain sin. / Do cenglad sidh re slogh nGaidel . ni gar fodhail d’fhine Gall . boin a muigh da mbi re bliadain . ni fhuil acht í ar íarraidh ann.’

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plundered its contents. Nechtain also captured Henry, the eldest son of Eógan O’Neill, this year and Eógan had to make terms with Nechtain for his release.87 This is the first time Henry, son of Eógan, is named in the annals.88 For the next decade or so he appears to have been given the same regional responsibility for the affairs of western Tír Eógain as had once been assigned to his great-uncle Henry Aimréid O’Neill. In 1432, Eógan’s de facto lordship over Tír Eógain was converted into a formal title when his cousin and rival, Domnall Boc son of Henry Aimréid, was assassinated by the O’Cahans at the beginning of January. Thereafter, Eógan was officially inaugurated as ‘king in the province’ at the ceremonial outdoor site of Telach Óc (Tullyhogue near Cookstown, county Tyrone) ‘on the flag-stone of the kings’.89 In favour of Eógan’s claim to be provincial king, he now had the allegiance of Muirchertach Rúad O’Neill, chief of Clandeboy, and of the young king of Fermanagh, Tomás Óc Maguire, but Niall Garb O’Donnell and his brother Nechtain and son Toirdelbach posed a serious threat. Eógan began by forming an alliance with O’Donnell’s constant opponents, the O’Conors of Sligo, who ‘placed their hands in his hand’, an expression implying a contract of submission and allegiance.90 We are told that his eldest son Henry was active in organizing this link-up, which was unsuccessfully opposed by Niall Garb O’Donnell, reinforced by the latter’s subordinate allies O’Rourke of west Breifne (county Leitrim) and the dispossessed first cousins of Maguire, the sons of Áed Maguire, the former tánaiste or deputy-chief, who occupied Lurg, in northwestern Fermanagh.91 Eógan followed up this diplomatic coup by ravaging Tír Conaill for three months that summer, destroying the chief residences of both Niall Garb and his brother Nechtain, but without winning a decisive victory, no doubt hampered, as all invaders of Tír Conaill have been, by its impregnable mountain ranges. Eógan was also less than successful in controlling the sub-kingdom of Airgialla this year. Magnus MacMahon, lord of Farney, had launched a number of particularly savage raids against the English settlements, and may have alarmed his brother, Brian MacMahon, king of Airgialla with the idea that he was about to make a bid for the rulership. In 1432, annals describe Magnus decorating the palisade of his fortress at Lurgan with numerous severed heads of Irish and Anglo-Irish enemies, to the horror of the not-unduly-squeamish bardic poets of Ireland.92 For whatever reason, Brian MacMahon brought his O’Keeffe, ‘Poems on the O’Donnells’, pp 46–9, verses 7, 15, 28, 29. [My translation, with the helpful supervision of the late Dr May Risk]. 87 AU 3, pp 116–17 (AD1431). 88 Though he was apparently old enough to join with his mother in ransoming Eógan from Brian Ballach O’Neill in 1422. Above p. 161. 89 AU 3, pp 118–19; ALC 2, pp 154–5; Ann. Conn., pp 472– 3; AFM 4, pp 886–7. 90 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 99–100. 91 See Katharine Simms, ‘Medieval Fermanagh’ in Fermanagh Hist. & Soc., pp 77–103, at pp 93–4. 92 AU 3, pp 118–19 (AD1432).

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followers with their flocks and herds over to the English settlements, and joined the colonists in an invasion of Airgialla itself, and a further attack on Armagh, where they plundered the churches, and extorted a large payment from the inhabitants as the price of not burning the town, an exaction that could be viewed as an Anglo-Irish demand for ‘black-rent’ from the Gaels.93 Next year, the war between Eógan O’Neill and Niall Garb O’Donnell continued, and the fact that it was fought out in eastern Ulster demonstrates that it was a struggle for control of the whole province. O’Donnell, having been abandoned by Muirchertach Rúad O’Neill of Clandeboy, had now made common cause with the Clandeboy O’Neills’ long-standing enemy, MacQuillin. Eógan O’Neill, on the other hand, had summoned to his aid a Scottish fleet sent by MacDonald of the Isles. Together O’Neill and the Scots drove O’Donnell and MacQuillin, with MacQuillin’s flocks and herds, out of the Route and into the Dufferin, the district west of Strangford Lough, where they were joined by Robert Savage. A battle took place there won by O’Neill and the Scots, in which MacQuillin lost many men and all his cattle. A fleeing remnant of his followers suffered a second defeat at ‘the river-pass (fersait) of the New Castle’, possibly an early reference to the fifteenth-century castle of Belfast (Bél Feirste), while O’Neill, his son Henry and his Scottish allies went on to burn the port of Ardglass in county Down. At that point, MacDonald embarked on his fleet to sail round the coast to Inishowen, while O’Neill took the land route to join him in harrying Tír Conaill. Since O’Donnell and his army were still absent, a council of the nobles of Tír Conaill, including Niall Garb’s queen, Findguala, and his brother Nechtain, had to negotiate a settlement with O’Neill. O’Donnell meanwhile went with MacQuillin to the Anglo-Irish of Meath, one of whose number, Christopher Plunket, was then governing as deputy for the absent lieutenant of Ireland, Sir Thomas Stanley. The two Ulster chiefs offered their services to make war on O’Neill. Plunket joined them with an army to invade Armagh, where they disgraced themselves by attacking the Franciscan friary, without making any political gain. Leaving MacQuillin and his men quartered on the inhabitants of  county Louth, O’Donnell brought his army back to Tír Conaill by way of  Meath, O’Kelly’s country of south Roscommon, MacDermot’s (Mac Diarmada’s) territory in north Roscommon, and then was escorted for the last leg of his journey by his subordinate ally, O’Rourke of west Breifne (county Leitrim), before encountering O’Neill and Maguire at Belleek in Fermanagh. At that point peace was arranged on terms that must have involved some submission on the part of O’Donnell.94 Nevertheless, the care with which the 93 AU 3, pp 122–3 (AD1432). Payment of protection-money by Irish chieftains to an AngloIrish magnate who had no legal claim to be their landlord is fully documented by a number of entries in the early sixteenth-century Kildare rental. See Mac Niocaill (ed.), Crown surveys of lands, 1540–41, pp 264–70. 94 AU 3, pp 126–9 (AD1433).

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annalist records the extensive circuit that O’Donnell made unopposed through Meath and north Connacht on his way homewards is significant, because the learned classes of Ireland considered that to bring one’s army unopposed through a territory was to demonstrate a kind of political superiority,95 and much of the ground Niall Garb covered on this occasion was to be gone over again by his son Áed Rúad in 1475 in a more overt display of lordship.96 Sir Thomas Stanley, lord of the Isle of Man, who held the lieutenancy of Ireland from January 1431 to April 1437 was apparently friendly with the Talbot faction, since he appointed Archbishop Richard Talbot as his deputy when he left in November 1435. In line with the predictions of Ormond’s critics, the Irish continued to be particularly aggressive during his term of office.97 The reconciliation of the two most powerful chiefs in Ulster, Niall Garb O’Donnell and Eógan O’Neill seems to have gained in sincerity in the course of 1434, because Niall Garb needed O’Neill’s support in a quarrel that had arisen with his own brother Nechtain O’Donnell. Nechtain by now had built himself a castle on the river Finn, in the disputed territory of Mag Itha, or western Cenél Múáin, which defied the efforts of O’Neill and O’Donnell to take it. In pursuance of his hostility against his brother Niall Garb, Nechtain had allied first with the O’Conors of Sligo, and then with Brian Óc, the grandson of Henry Aimréid O’Neill, and with MacQuillin.98 In the autumn of 1434, just before Michaelmas, Eógan O’Neill and Niall Garb O’Donnell joined forces to invade the colonists, taking black-rent from Dundalk as a bribe to leave the town unharmed, but setting fire to settlements throughout Louth and Meath. Eógan’s two eldest sons, Henry and Áed, concentrated on the destruction of the town of Nobber in Meath, narrowly escaping Sir Thomas Stanley’s avenging army in the process. O’Donnell was not so lucky – Niall Garb himself was captured, and eventually died in prison in Sir Thomas Stanley’s lordship of Man in 1439. Niall’s most politically prominent son, Toirdelbach O’Donnell, was killed in the same encounter, leaving the way open for his brother Nechtain to take control of Tír Conaill, though he could not call himself king until after Niall Garb’s death.99 In 1435 and 1436, Eógan O’Neill, who had already been warring with Nechtain before Niall Garb’s capture, brought the initially reluctant Maguire chief with him on repeated raids against Tír Conaill, lopped a hand and foot off Brian Óc O’Neill, leader of Clann Henry Aimréid,100 and recovered the castle on 95 See Katharine Simms, ‘The contents of later commentaries on the Brehon law tracts’, Ériu, 49 (1998), 23–40: 34. Above, p. 73. 96 AU 3, pp 254–7 (AD1475). 97 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 368–9; Cosgrove, ‘Chief governors’, NHI 9, pp 476–7. 98 AFM 4, pp 896–9. See Simms, ‘Niall Garb II’, pp 17–18. 99 AU 3, pp 130–3 (AD1434); Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 258, no. 92. 100 For poems on this event see ABM, no. 288; Gordon Ó Riain (ed.), ‘Dán Réitigh le Conchobhar Ruadh Mac Con Midhe (d.1481)’ in Pádraig A. Breatnach, Caoimhín Breatnach and Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail (eds), Léann Láimhscríbhinní Lobháin: the Louvain

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the island of Loch Láegaire from Brian Óc’s sons.101 By 1437, a peace was arrived at between Nechtain O’Donnell, as acting ruler of Tír Conaill during his brother’s captivity, and Eógan, the Great O’Neill. This still did not put O’Neill in control of the whole province. The mutilated Brian Óg, leader of Clann Henry Aimréid O’Neill, continued to mount resistance to Eógan’s authority, and also in 1437, an internecine feud between the lord of Airgialla, Brian MacMahon and his brother Magnus MacMahon resulted in Brian once more crossing over to ally with the Anglo-Irish colonists, while Magnus sided with Eógan O’Neill.102

THE INFLUENCE OF THE

4TH

EARL OF ORMOND

Throughout these years, English government in Ireland had been directed by Richard Talbot, archbishop of Dublin, first as deputy to Sir Thomas Stanley (November 1435–April 1437) and then as justiciar, elected by the king’s council in Ireland (April 1437–May 1438). In 1438, there came a change of personnel. Lionel Lord Welles was appointed king’s lieutenant in Ireland, and with him he brought over James Butler, 4th earl of Ormond, who was to act as his deputy lieutenant (March 1441 until later in the same year) before being appointed king’s lieutenant himself (February 1442–October 1444).103 There are signs of a very different approach to the Ulster chiefs being implemented under Welles and Ormond. In 1439, an agreement was reached with the O’Donnells to release their imprisoned chieftain, Niall Garb, in exchange for a large ransom, although, as it happened, the unfortunate man died before the exchange took place, his bard unfeelingly pointing this out as a consoling thought in the course of his elegy: The money promised for him – what a calamity – was a drain on the wealth of the Ulaidh, and yet that wealth nearly had to be paid by you, O Ulaidh, for his ashes! Sorry are ye, ye heroes of the Danair, that he died unransomed; your grief, O Foreigners, greatly lessens mine!104 Nechtain O’Donnell, the late king’s brother, was immediately inaugurated as his successor in Tír Conaill and, in 1440, the Four Masters record that a peace was concluded between Nechtain and Eógan O’Neill, indicating that the earlier peace of 1437 had been broken.105 Then in March 1441, a certain Richard Rowe, LL.B., was awarded 20 shillings by the king’s council in Ireland for services in manuscript heritage (Dublin, 2007), pp 54–75. 101 AU 3, pp 134–41 (AD1435); AFM 4, pp 902–9; Ann. Conn., pp 476–7; ALC 2, pp 154–7. 102 AFM 4, pp 908–11. 103 OtwayRuthven, Med. Ire., pp 369–74; Cosgrove, ‘Chief governors’, NHI 9, p. 477. 104 Aithd., 1, p. 91; 2, p. 55, verses 23–4. See Simms, ‘Niall Garbh II’, pp 18–19. 105 AFM 4, pp 908–11.

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connection with the recent submission of the Great O’Neill and his subordinate ally Eógan O’Reilly, chief of east Breifne. From the account of Archbishop John Prene, primate of Armagh, we learn that Eógan O’Neill had taken an oath of allegiance to the English king in the presence of Ormond, as deputy lieutenant, and of the king’s council, and had issued letters patent acknowledging (among other articles, no doubt) that he was bound to restore to the primate all church lands occupied by himself, his brothers, sons or subjects, a very needful if ultimately ineffective stipulation, since large tracts of church lands in south Armagh were being progressively occupied by junior branches of the O’Neill dynasty in the first half of the fifteenth century.106 The more immediate political fruit of this submission came in 1442, when the annals say Henry son of Eógan O’Neill went to the territory of the Foreigners, and brought a body of Anglo-Irishmen back with him to meet up with his father Eógan’s full army at Nechtain O’Donnell’s castle on the river Finn. O’Donnell was forced to submit and surrender possession not only of his castle, which Henry O’Neill garrisoned with his own men, but he also yielded up his claims to the long-disputed territory of Cenél Múáin and agreed that O’Neill should have the tribute due from the peninsula of Inishowen, once ruled by the MacLaughlins and O’Neills, but now occupied by O’Donnell’s vassal chief, O’Doherty.107 Having used Anglo-Irish military power to support Eógan O’Neill, who had sworn allegiance to the English king, in his claim to exercise lordship over O’Donnell, who had not, Ormond then took steps to limit the Great O’Neill’s rule in eastern Ulster. The records of Primate John Swayne indicate that Muirchertach Rúad son of Brian Ballach was head of the Clandeboy O’Neills in south Antrim from at least 1427, aided by his younger brother Áed Buide II, and that jointly they exercised authority over MacGilmore in north county Down.108 Then, in 1440, Áed Buide II obtained papal dispensation to marry the recently widowed Findguala, daughter of An Calbach O’Conor Faly, who had been the late Niall Garb O’Donnell’s queen, and the poem which celebrates their union indicates that Áed Buide now held ambitions to outshine his elder brother and chief: No shame is felt by the men of Ulaidh if Aodh take precedence of them … If Aodh, seed of the royal line, attain the other part of his inheritance – he has inherited the generosity of the kings before him – ’twill be right. … A king of the true royal blood now deserves the high-kingship.109 106 Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 263, no. 8; Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Register of Primate John Prene, Lib. 1, f. 126r. See Katharine Simms, ‘The archbishops of Armagh and the O’Neills, 1347–1461’, IHS, 19 (1974), 38–55: 50–3. 107 AU 3, pp 150–1 (AD1442); AFM 4, pp 926–7. 108 Chart, Reg. Swayne, p. 82. 109 W.H. Bliss et al. (eds), Calendar of entries in the papal registers relating to Great Britain and Ireland: papal letters (14 vols, London,

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The Four Masters tell us that, in 1442, a war broke out between Áed Buide II O’Neill and MacQuillin of the Route, and that the Great O’Neill took the side of MacQuillin against Áed Buide.110 In the same year, according to Primate John Prene of Armagh, the earl of Ormond, by now king’s lieutenant in Ireland, had come to Dundalk and held a meeting with Art Magennis, chief of Uí Echach in south Down. Magennis agreed, presumably as part of a general submission, to return the church lands of the bishopric of Dromore, and pay compensation for having unjustly sequestered them, and Áed Buide II O’Neill undertook that if Art defaulted on the conditions of the treaty Áed Buide would rise out in war ‘against him as his subject’.111 Similarly in January 1443 the primate appealed to Aed Buide II as the secular arm of the church, asking him to intervene in a dispute over the rectory of Newtownbreda, county Down,112 but making no reference to Muirchertach Rúad O’Neill, the titular chief of Clandeboy. That year, Áed Buide seized large herds of cattle from his elder brother, and Muirchertach Rúad agreed to acknowledge Áed Buide as head of the family in exchange for the return of his livestock.113 Ormond seems to have been encouraging Áed Buide II O’Neill not only to usurp the headship of Clann Áeda Buide, but to claim overlordship of Magennis. Since he already dominated MacGilmore and had attempted to subdue MacQuillin earlier in 1442, Áed was well on his way to building up the paramount lordship over all eastern Ulster that resulted in the title ‘lord of Trían Congail’, ‘lord of Congal’s Third [of Ulster]’ being applied to the most powerful leaders of the Clandeboy O’Neills later in the fifteenth century.114 By supporting this development, Ormond may have hoped to return to the situation that followed Ralph D’Ufford’s deposition of Henry son of Brian Ó Néill in 1344, when the Clandeboy O’Neills formed an independent buffer-state between the Great O’Neill of Tír Eógain and the Anglo-Irish settlers in county Down.115 It is even possible that Ormond permitted Áed Buide II to remain in possession of the crumbling royal castle of Carrickfergus. A Leinster poet who HMSO, 1883–60), 9, p. 97; Aithd., 1, pp 73–5; 2, pp 44–5, verses 21, 31, 36. See Katharine Simms, ‘Bardic poetry as a historical source’ in Tom Dunne (ed.), The writer as witness: Historical Studies XVI (Cork, 1987), pp 58–75, at pp 64–5. 110 Curiously, MacQuillin earlier that year had been allied with the Clann Henry Aimréid O’Neill against O’Cahan of Derry, who was normally a loyal vassal of the Great O’Neill – AFM 4, pp 927–9. 111 Belfast PRONI, Register of Primate John Prene, Lib. i, ff. 30r–30v. 112 Belfast PRONI, Register of Primate John Prene, Lib. i, f. 28r. See William Reeves, Ecclesiastical antiquities of Down, Connor and Dromore (Dublin, 1847), p. 15. 113 Ann. MacFirb., p. 201. 114 Whitley Stokes (ed.), ‘The Gaelic Maundeville’, ZCP, 2 (1898–9), 1–63, 226–312, 603–4: 4. The title ‘lord of Trian Conghail’ was applied to Conn, d.1482, Aodh Óg, d.1485, Niall Mór, d.1512, and Niall Óg, d.1537. AFM 4, pp 1074–5, 1132–3; 5, 1312–13, 1440–1. The ‘Congal’ in question was probably Congal Cáech, the king of Ulaid who resisted the northern high-king’s claims to overlordship in the saga ‘Fled Dúin na nGéd and the Battle of Mag Roth’. See above, pp 46, 48, 73. 115 See above, pp 122–3.

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visited Áed Buide’s residence says that his lordship was centred on ‘the harbour of Carrickfergus’.116 In December 1441, Sir James White was still claiming payment for his salary as constable of Carrickfergus from 1425 to 1427, during which time he had kept the castle at his own expense,117 and it may have proved difficult to find such altruism in subsequent appointees,118 or the poet may have merely been referring to O’Neill’s new castle at Belfast as the ferry-port for Carrickfergus, as the Connacht annalist referred to the shore opposite the Rock of Loch Cé as ‘Calad na Cairrce’, or ‘Port na Caircce’, the ‘harbour of the Rock’.119 Ormond’s policy of supporting an independent Clandeboy lordship appears to have alienated the Great O’Neill, Eógan son of Niall Óc. The first sign of this came when Archbishop John Prene died in 1443, and the Irish clerics who made up the cathedral chapter of Armagh made the surprising decision to elect Archbishop Richard Talbot of Dublin as his successor. Their letter asking Henry VI to confirm this unlicensed election was accompanied by a letter from Eógan O’Neill himself, warmly endorsing Archbishop Talbot’s candidature.120 The election was ignored, and the next primate was a Meath cleric, John Mey, but Eógan’s letter in support of Talbot necessarily implied opposition to Ormond at that time, in view of the long-standing Talbot–Ormond feud. Later in the decade, O’Neill and Ormond would compete, sometimes in open warfare, over their sponsorship of rival candidates for Irish chieftainships along the frontier with the English colony. In April 1444, Áed Buide was mortally wounded while raiding Magennis’s territory to enforce his claims to overlordship there. He was described in his death-notice as ‘the only man (in his own dayes) that most planted of English lands against their wills that was in Ireland’,121 and it had been during his time that the Clandeboy O’Neills can be shown to have expanded their territory from south Antrim into north Down, taking the MacGilmore chieftains under their wing. Immediately after news of Áed Buide’s lingering death in May, Eógan O’Neill brought a great army of Ulster chieftains, with the exception of O’Donnell, to invade Clandeboy. Significantly, he brought his army not into south Antrim but into the Dufferin in county Down, east of Strangford Lough, 116 ‘I gcaladh Chairrgi Ferghais atá lár a fhlaithemhnais’, Ó Donnchadha, Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe, p. 68, lines 81–2. 117 Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 265, no. 56. 118 In 1430 custody of the castle was officially granted to Thomas Benson of York, and in 1463 to the exiled Scot, James, 9th earl of Douglas (Cal. pat. rolls, 1429–36, p. 100, ibid., 1461–7, p. 291). In the intervening period responsibility for the royal castle may have been vested in the duke of York as earl of Ulster. The calendar of the Irish chancery rolls has no surviving record of patent rolls between the 13th and 28th year of Henry VI. 119 Ann. Conn., pp 40, 56, 238, 254, 276. 120 Quigley & Roberts, Reg. Mey, nos. 288, 289. 121 Ann. MacFirb., p. 203. The same annals tell us that earlier that year Áed Buide had taken Magennis prisoner, and forced him to pay a fine of two hundred cows and surrender his castle into Áed Buide’s keeping, giving hostages to guarantee his submission, but he had clearly rebelled immediately afterwards.

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where they were brilliantly ambushed in the woods by the chief of Clandeboy, Muirchertach Rúad O’Neill, his brother Henry, who seems to have shared something of Áed Buide’s military gifts, and MacQuillin of the Route, who had changed sides yet again. The Great O’Neill was comprehensively defeated, his MacDonald galloglass constable was killed and he had to deliver up his second son, Áed ‘of the Fews’, and his grandson, the son of his first-born son Henry, along with MacMahon’s son and sixteen other hostages before he and his army were allowed to retreat homewards in disgrace.122 Perhaps to recover some of his lost prestige, Eógan O’Neill brought his army that same year to invade and plunder county Louth, taking a ‘black-rent’ of 60 marks and two tuns of wine from the town of Dundalk as the price of not burning it. In what may be a second account of the same expedition, the Four Masters state that O’Neill received ‘great rewards for making peace with them [the Anglo-Irish] for half a year’.123 We may have a reference to this treaty in a letter to Eógan O’Neill from John, archbishop of Armagh, dated to 16 June ‘in the second year of our consecration’.124 Since most of the fifteenth-century archbishops of Armagh were called John, and their letters have consequently been mixed together, this could have been written by Archbishop John Prene in 1441, or by Archbishop John Mey in 1446. The letter, however, refers to oaths taken by O’Neill on the Bachall Ísa, the ‘Staff of Jesus’, Ireland’s premier relic, believed to have been St Patrick’s crosier, and at this time held in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. These oaths, which included promises to compensate the church for attacks on its lands, were taken before the king’s lieutenant and the king’s council in Ireland. Since Eógan’s submission in 1441 was in the presence of Ormond as deputy, and there was no chief governor in Ireland with the title of king’s lieutenant from the time Ormond left the country at the end of August 1444 and the arrival of John Talbot, now earl of Shrewsbury, in November 1446,125 it would appear that Mey is writing in June 1446, invoking the terms of an agreement made between Eógan O’Neill and Ormond in the summer of 1444, presumably the well-rewarded six-months truce mentioned by the annals. The rewards may have included ongoing payments of ‘black-rent’ or protection-money from county Louth,126 as Eógan’s aggressions against the Anglo-Irish ceased for a time, and he seems to have concentrated on consolidating his control over his vassal-chiefs. Ormond’s constant struggle with the Talbots for control of the Anglo-Irish government had given rise to ancillary quarrels with officials in the Anglo-Irish administration, which resulted in his being summoned to England, in the

122 AFM 4, pp 932–5; AU 3, pp 152–3 (AD1444). 123 AFM 4, pp 934–7. 124 Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Register of Primate John Prene, Lib. 1, f. 117r. 125 Cosgrove, ‘Chief governors’, NHI 9, p. 477 and note 81. 126 In 1515, county Louth was said to owe £40 annually to the Great O’Neill – State papers, Hen. VIII, pt 3, p. 9.

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autumn of 1444, to answer charges of treason.127 However, the original feud with the Talbots was by then settled through the marriage of Ormond’s daughter Elizabeth to the son of John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury. Although the treasurer of Ireland and the prior of Kilmainham charged Ormond not only with treason, but with black magic, and challenged him to a duel, the English king dismissed all charges against him in 1447. That year, Richard duke of York was appointed king’s lieutenant of Ireland and Ormond returned from London to assist Richard Nugent, Baron Delvin, who was appointed as York’s deputy in December 1448.128 Already in August 1444, Ormond had left Richard Nugent as his own deputy under the terms of an indenture in which Nugent agreed, among other conditions: ‘the deputy shall be friendly and favourable in lawful manner to MacMahon’s sons. And if any profit come to him by making peace or war with MacMahon half of it shall go to the Lieutenant [Ormond] and the other half to him [Delvin] as deputy’.129 The MacMahons of Airgialla were a key frontier lordship bordering on Louth. Logic suggests that the MacMahon against whom Delvin might make war was not identical with the MacMahon whose sons were to be treated favourably, and the historical circumstances of the MacMahon family at this time support this interpretation. Brian MacMahon, lord of Airgialla, had allied with the English settlers on a number of occasions in his later career. This Brian died in 1442, and his bloodthirsty brother Magnus, lord of Farney, followed him to the grave within a year or so, but the new lord of Airgialla was not one of Brian’s sons, instead it was Rudraige, the ageing brother of Brian and Magnus, who was a loyal supporter of Eógan O’Neill.130 When Rudraige in his turn died in 1446, Eógan O’Neill appointed Rudraige’s son, Áed Rúad MacMahon, to succeed him as the new lord of Airgialla, ignoring the claims of Feilim, son of Brian MacMahon, and his brothers, and it was most likely these latter who were favoured by Ormond and the baron of Delvin.131 O’Neill was also successful in continuing his influence over east Breifne (county Cavan). At the time that Ormond was dismissed as lieutenant in November 1444, Archbishop Richard Talbot was appointed justiciar, to be superseded by the arrival of his brother John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, as king’s lieutenant in November 1446. Interestingly, Talbot, who brought an army northwards to pacify the marches in January 1447,132 drew up quite a favourable 127 Griffith, ‘The Talbot–Ormond struggle’, pp 387–9. 128 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 374–5; Cosgrove, ‘Chief governors’, NHI 9, p. 477. 129 Curtis, Calendar of Ormond deeds 3, pp 158–9. 130 Rudraige was the MacMahon who had yielded up a son as hostage to secure the safe retreat of the Ulster army from the Dufferin after Eógan’s unsuccessful attempt to conquer Clann Áeda Buide in May 1444. See above, pp 175–6. 131 Ann. MacFirb., p. 216; Ann. Conn., pp 484–5; AFM 4, pp 928–9, 938–9, 944–5. AU record Magnus MacMahon’s death under 1443, Ann. MacFirb. under 1444, and AFM under both years. See also Katharine Simms, ‘Monaghan in the later Middle Ages’ in Monaghan Hist. & Soc., pp 131–61, at pp 152–3. 132 Early Statutes II, pp 106–7.

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indenture between himself and Áed Rúad, the new MacMahon, which has survived in an Elizabethan summary. MacMahon swore allegiance to the king, renounced border raids and the exaction of black-rent from the Anglo-Irish, and promised ‘to paie all bonaughts etc. as he paide to the duke of Yorke’.133 Not all Irish nobles fared as well at Talbot’s hands. The lieutenant held a parliament at Trim, county Meath, in which it was enacted that Irish enemies violating peace treaties could be attacked at will: It is ordained … that it be lawful to every liege man who can meet with them after the said offence so committed, to do with the said Irishmen so received to the allegiance abovementioned … as to a man who never had become liege without any impeachment of law, notwithstanding any statute; and them to ransom at their free will without any impeachment.134 While at Trim, Talbot, apparently acting in the spirit of this new law, summoned Feilim, the brother of Eógan O’Reilly, chief of east Breifne (county Cavan area), to come and meet him, and promptly clapped him in prison, where he died later in the same year of the plague.135 The same parliament at Trim, in 1447, legislated to outlaw ‘the money of Oraylly’.136 Although during the chieftainship of Eógan na Fésóige (‘E. the Bearded’) O’Reilly (d.1449) east Breifne had come under the authority of the Great O’Neill, it was quite untypical of the other Ulster lordships, being much more closely involved in the Anglo-Irish society of Meath. Eógan O’Reilly appears to have issued ‘plated copies of the English groat’, ‘the money of Oraylly’,137 which circulated locally in Breifne and Meath, and he is credited with passing ‘statutes’ regulating the relations of landlords and tenants, which were still observed as ‘the laws of Owen the Bearded’ in late seventeenth-century Westmeath as well as in Breifne.138 When Eógan O’Reilly himself died in March 1449, the Great O’Neill intervened to ensure that he was succeeded as chieftain of east Breifne by his son Seaán O’Reilly, whereas the English of Meath, led by the deputy Richard Nugent, Baron Delvin, and his patron the earl of Ormond, supported the candidacy of a rival kinsman, Fergal son of Tomás Mór O’Reilly. A battle 133 Shirley, The territory or dominion of Farney, pp 24–5; Cal. Carew MSS, 5, p. 290. The apparent reference to the duke of York in the past tense might suggest the Elizabethan extract was wrongly dated to 25 Hen. VI (1446–7) and the document belonged to a time after the duke of York’s visit to Ireland, 1449–50, or even after his death, but no king’s lieutenant apart from York himself was resident in Ireland for the rest of the fifteenth century after Shrewsbury’s term of office. 134 Early Statutes II, pp 88–91. 135 De hÓir, ‘Annála as Bréifne’, p. 69; AU 3, pp 160–1 (AD1447); ALC 2, pp 158–9; Ann. MacFirb., pp 218–19; AFM 4, pp 952–3; James Carney (ed.), Poems on the O’Reillys (Dublin, 1950), pp 169–70. 136 Early Statutes II, pp 90–1. 137 Michael Dolley and W.A. Seaby, ‘Le money del O Raylly’, The British Numismatic Journal, 36 (1967), 114–17: 116. 138 De hÓir, ‘Annála as Bréifne’, p. 68; James Carney (ed.), A genealogical history of the O’Reillys ([Cavan] 1959), pp 19–20; Henry Piers, A chorographical description of the county of West-Meath (reprinted from Charles Vallancey (ed.),

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took place, in which the Great O’Neill and Áed Rúad MacMahon, the new lord of Airgialla, defeated Ormond and Delvin, and Seaán O’Reilly was confirmed as ruler of east Breifne, continuing his father’s political dependence on O’Neill.139 This new pattern of rivalry between Ormond and O’Neill for political control of the border chieftains may have been sparked off by Ormond’s sponsorship in 1442 of an independent overlordship for the Clandeboy O’Neills over the other Irish of Ulaid. At that date, Ormond had accepted the late Áed Buide II O’Neill as Magennis’s overlord,140 whereas the Great O’Neill had tried to bring both the Clandeboy O’Neills and Magennis under his own control. A chance reference by Archbishop John Mey, who was appealing to the secular nobility for support against Thomas Pollard, self-styled bishop of Down, informs us of a meeting held in Ardglass on 9 December 1448 when those present included Henry O’Neill, eldest son of Eógan ‘the Great O’Neill’, Jenkin MacQuillin, chief of his name, together with Robert Savage and Lewis and Patrick White.141 Subsequent events suggest that Henry O’Neill was discussing an alliance with the AngloIrish families of Ulster against the Clandeboy O’Neills. The Anglo-Irish colony in Ulster may have felt under increased threat since an alliance seems to have grown up between the Clandeboy O’Neills and the Scots of the Glens.142 In 1449, Muirchertach Rúad O’Neill of Clandeboy suffered a severe defeat at the hands of MacQuillin, in which MacDonald’s son Áengus was among those killed.143 The Great O’Neill’s authority over Magennis was demonstrated when, according to the record of the Anglo-Irish parliament, shortly before the duke of York’s arrival in Ireland on 6 July 1449 to take up his duties as king’s lieutenant: ‘O’Neill, MacMahon, Magennis, O’Hanlon with divers other captains, enemies to our lord the king, with a great multitude … came into the county of Louth to burn and destroy’.144 This took place apparently in early April Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis I (Naas, 1981)), p. 119. Below, p. 460. 139 Ann. MacFirb., p. 222; AU 3, pp 162–3 (AD1449); AFM 4, pp 962–3; ALC 2, pp 160–1. 140 See above, p. 174. 141 Quigley & Roberts, Reg. Mey, p. 172. Thomas Pollard was violently supported by Sir James White, the former seneschal of Ulster. The contents of the archbishop’s letter appealing to the Anglo-Irish nobles for aid were translated from Latin into Irish for their better understanding. In 1447, Robert Savage’s sons had died as prisoners or hostages in the castle of Trim ‘where they were wickedly taken’ by the lieutenant John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury – Ann. MacFirb., p. 219. 142 Kingston, Ulster and the Isles, p. 70 states that about 1435 Domnall Ballach (‘D. the Freckled’) MacDonald, the Scottish lord of the Glens of Antrim, had married Johanna or Siuban O’Neill of Clandeboy as his second wife. He cites Kenneth Nicholls, ‘Notes on the genealogy of Clann Eóin Mhóir’, West Highland Notes and Queries, ser. 2/8 (Nov. 1991), 11–24: 12, who mentions only Domnall Ballach’s marriage to Siuban, daughter of O’Donnell. However AU 3, pp 330–1 (AD1488) records that Domnall Ballach’s daughter, Maria, was married to Conn, son of Áed Buide II O’Neill. 143 Ann. MacFirb., p. 223; AFM 4, pp 962–5. In O’Donovan’s translation the name of MacQuillin is omitted from this entry, although present in the accompanying Irish text. 144 Early Statutes II, pp 206–7.

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since, by 18 April 1449, Primate John Mey wrote to Archbishop Talbot that O’Neill was insisting Mey be present at his imminent peace conference with York’s deputy, the baron of Delvin, in order to testify to the terms of the last truce.145 In a later letter sent to the duke of York, Mey explained that Ormond was also involved in arranging the truce with O’Neill.146 The timing of the peace conference in the second half of April suggests that O’Neill’s invasion of Louth had been related to his conflict with Ormond over who was to succeed as chief of east Breifne when Eógan O’Reilly died about 17 March. Ormond’s prominence both in the battle to determine the O’Reilly succession and the peace conference with O’Neill confirms his dominance over the baron of Delvin, the official deputy to the duke of York. By the time the duke of York landed in July, a truce was in force, and before 15 August he had received submissions and offers of allegiance from Art Magennis, chief of Uí Echach in south Down, at the head of a force of 600 men on horse and foot, two-thirds of them in armour, from Áed Rúad MacMahon, with 800 men on horse and foot, and both the O’Reilly chiefs (Seaán son of Eógan O’Reilly, O’Neill’s candidate, and Fergal son of Tomás O’Reilly, Ormond’s candidate), with 700 men on horse and foot between them. MacQuillin also came in to offer his services at the head of 800 armoured men on horse and foot, but he was not required to submit, since he still counted as an Anglo-Irish liege subject.147 The O’Neill submission was delayed, because when Primate Mey took advantage of the truce arranged by Ormond and Delvin to conduct a visitation of his diocese of Armagh-among-the-Irish, he was impeded by the sons of Eógan O’Neill, who had annexed much of the church lands in south county Armagh, and he had excommunicated the whole family. However the chief offenders, Eógan’s second son, Áed ‘of the Fews’, and a third brother, Muirchertach O’Neill, made their peace with the archbishop on 3 August, and on 27 August at Drogheda, Henry, the eldest son and heir of Eógan O’Neill, on behalf of his father, his brothers and his sons submitted to the duke of York, did homage, offering his right hand to the duke, and swore to return all castles, manors and lands in Ulster which had ever belonged to the duke or his de Burgh predecessors in the earldom of Ulster, and to render all ancient dues and services including the ‘Bonaght of Ulster’. He promised to suppress any rebellion against the duke by any Ulster Irish, and to join the duke when summoned to war with a force of 1,000 men, comprising 500 (mounted) menat-arms, and 500 foot soldiers, armed with lances, axes and bows, who would fight at O’Neill’s own expense within the borders of Ulster, or at the duke’s expense elsewhere in Ireland. He made further ‘pie-crust’ promises (i.e., ‘made to be broken’) to hand back the Fews in south Armagh to the Bellew family of county Louth, to render tithes to the church and vacate church lands occupied 145 Quigley & Roberts, Reg. Mey, p. 135. 146 Ibid., p. 168. 147 Edmund Curtis, ‘Richard duke of York as viceroy of Ireland, 1447–1460’, JRSAI, 62 (1932), 158–86: 166.

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by his kinsmen. The duke for his part promised to see justice done to Eógan and Henry O’Neill if they had suffered loss or injury from his subjects in the earldom of Ulster, and to support them if they were attacked by Irish from other parts of Ireland. Henry promised to pay 600 beeves as a fine to have his homage accepted, and agreed to submit to the judgement of Primate Mey, who could impose an aggravated sentence of excommunication on him if he broke the terms of the agreement.148 A list of chiefs who gave presents of cattle to the duke of York in the summer of 1449 is of some interest in clarifying the factions then at work. It includes Art Magennis, who gave 300 cows, Fergal O’Reilly, Ormond’s candidate for the chieftainship of east Breifne, who gave 360 cows, and Feilim son of Brian MacMahon, who was favoured by Ormond, but had been passed over by O’Neill for the chieftainship of Airgialla. Feilim MacMahon gave the duke 280 cows, but apparently no payments were received from the O’Neill appointees, Seaán O’Reilly and Áed Rúad MacMahon.149 The chief of Clandeboy, Muirchertach Rúad O’Neill, did not conclude his peace with Sir William Oldhall, the duke’s chamberlain and seneschal of Ulster, until 2 October 1449 but it is not clear whether this was because he only submitted after being roundly defeated by MacQuillin, as mentioned above, or whether negotiations were delayed because the chieftain was excommunicated as a result of his marital difficulties. He was, at the time, attempting unsuccessfully to dissolve his marriage to Margaret MacMahon, daughter of the late Magnus MacMahon, lord of Farney in Monaghan, and to form a new association with Roesia White,150 presumably a kinswoman of the redoubtable Sir James White, former seneschal of Ulster and constable of the royal castle of Carrickfergus. The sentence of excommunication against Muirchertach Rúad was however temporarily lifted on 2 October to enable him to enter into an agreement with Sir William Oldhall in much the same terms as had been outlined in the indenture between the duke and Henry O’Neill in August.151 The duke of York, who was a very capable military commander and administrator, did not confine his attentions to his vestigial earldom of Ulster. A military campaign in Wicklow, in August 1449, brought submissions and payments of fines from the Leinster Irish.152 Before Michaelmas, the Irish chiefs associated with his midland lordship of Trim, Fergal Mageoghegan of Westmeath and Domnall O’Farrell of Longford, had also submitted, along with many Anglo-Irish nobles. York’s optimistic publicists prophesied ‘with the myght of Jesus or twelmonth come to an end ye wildest Yrishman in Yrland shall be swore English’.153 148 Edmund Curtis, ‘The “Bonnacht” of Ulster’, Hermathena, 46 (1931), 87–105: 87–91. 149  Curtis, ‘Richard duke of York’, 166. 150  Quigley & Roberts, Reg. Mey, pp 133–4, 210–11, 222–3. 151 Ibid., pp 155–6. 152 O’Byrne, War, politics and the Irish of Leinster, p. 130. 153 Curtis, ‘Richard duke of York’, 167; Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 379–81.

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However, York never showed the same commitment as the Mortimers appeared to have felt to the idea of reactivating his extensive theoretical claims to land and authority in Ireland. He was a prince of the blood royal with enormous estates and revenues in England and, as Henry VI was as yet childless, he had good claim to be considered heir apparent to the throne. His appointment as king’s lieutenant in Ireland from 1447 was regarded by many as a form of banishment.154 During his first stay there, momentous events were taking place in England. Normandy was recovered by the French king, resulting in an economic crisis in England, particularly for the trading ports along the south coast. The payments York had been promised from England failed to materialise, while the counties of Kent and Sussex rose in revolt in June and July 1450, led by Jack Cade, the ‘captain of Kent’, who called himself John Mortimer and claimed to be a cousin of York himself. York was already unhappy during his second year of government in Ireland. His administration was under-financed and there was renewed revolt from Mageoghegan and other Irish chiefs who had previously submitted. The duke now returned to England to clear his name of complicity in Cade’s revolt, taking his large armed retinue with him, and leaving the 4th earl of Ormond to govern Ireland as his deputy.155 Ormond, the ‘White Earl’ (an t-Iarla Bán) as Irish genealogists were to call him, was the most influential nobleman in Ireland, quite apart from the place he had earned at the English court by his exploits in the Hundred Years War. Just as the Great O’Neill amassed control over vassal chieftains and territories in the mid-fifteenth century, so Ormond had extended his personal authority far beyond his own family’s lands. We have already seen that he counted Richard Nugent, baron of Delvin in Meath, among his adherents. He had married the only daughter and heiress of the 5th earl of Kildare, and though the marriage failed to produce an heir, Ormond kept possession of the Kildare Fitzgeralds’ chief castle of Maynooth and most of the lands of that earldom for life. He had extended the authority associated with his liberty court of Tipperary to embrace the county of Kilkenny also, and the borough towns and crosslands or church lands in the region, so that he summoned their representatives to meet him and pass local legislation for the area ‘as well as the kyng may hole hys parlement’.156 To this official and unofficial influence over the Anglo-Irish, he added a less definable domination over a network of Irish chieftains, including both the Great O’Neill and O’Neill of Clandeboy. This close and mutually beneficial

154 Thomas Wright, Political poems and songs relating to English history composed during the period from the accession of Edw. III to that of Ric. III (2 vols, London, 1861), 2, p. 223; Wolffe, Henry VI, p. 220. 155 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 381–4; Wolffe, Henry VI, pp 240–4. 156 C.A. Empey and Katharine Simms, ‘The ordinances of the White Earl and the problem of coign in the later Middle Ages’, PRIA, 75C (1975), 161–87: 164–71; Elizabeth Matthew, ‘Butler, James, fourth earl of Ormond (1390–1452)’ in Oxford DNB, 9, pp 147–9.

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relationship with the Irish was celebrated in a bardic poem addressed to the earl about 1447 by Tadc Óc Ó hUicinn.157 Even Ormond, however, could not enforce the promises the Irish made to York in 1449. It was presumably quite acceptable to the Anglo-Irish that, in 1450, two sons of the Great O’Neill, Henry and Art ‘of Omagh’, invaded eastern Ulster against the O’Neills of Clandeboy, since they went there to assist MacQuillin of the Route, who was still seen as an Anglo-Irish leader, though the expedition itself was not very successful. The wording of the Annals of Ulster when recording this incident is significant, however. They call Eógan O’Neill ‘king of the Province’ (rí in Cóiced), while Ulster east of the Bann is termed in this entry Trían Congail (‘Congal’s Third’). This is an early example of the use of this phrase to denote the area subject to the Clandeboy O’Neills in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.158 It suggests the latter now aspired to an overlordship of all Ulster east of the Upper and Lower Bann, equivalent to that third (trían) of the whole province that the seventh-century king of the Ulaid, Congal Cáech, resented holding as a vassal of the Uí Néill high-king in the saga ‘Fled Dúin na nGéd’, ‘The Banquet of Dún na nGéd’, because he complained that his Ulaid ancestors used to rule the whole north of Ireland.159 While this raid on Clandeboy may have been acceptable to the Anglo-Irish administration, the O’Neills of Tír Eógain were subsequently more clearly in breach of their undertakings after York had departed. In December 1451, Primate Mey began a reproachful letter to Eógan and his son Henry O’Neill: ‘Alas that we cannot deservedly write to you “Beloved sons in Christ and our friends”!’ and then went on to complain of the broken promises of O’Neill’s younger sons, who still occupied church lands in Armagh, and imposed taxation and billeting on churchmen and church tenants, while harassing the archbishop himself and his servants on his episcopal visitation.160 Then, in 1452, Henry O’Neill seemed to make a deliberate attempt to break his political links with the elderly ‘White Earl’ of Ormond. In Tír Conaill at this period there was continuing rivalry between the chief Nechtain O’Donnell and his nephews, the sons of the late Niall Garb II. Nechtain expelled the sons of Niall with their followers, but in the first half of 1452 Henry O’Neill took up their cause and, on the eve of the feast of St Brendan of Clonfert (May 16th), some of his followers joined the sons of Niall Garb on an invasion of Tír Conaill, in the course of which Nechtain O’Donnell was killed. Henry immediately entered Tír Conaill accompanied by a full muster of ‘the nobles of the Province’, and mediated a settlement between the sons of Niall Garb and the sons of Nechtain. As in 1442, Henry reserved the O’Donnell 157 Below, p. 191; Aithd., 1, pp 140–3; 2, pp 84–6. See Simms, ‘Bards and barons’, pp 186–7. 158 Stokes, ‘The Gaelic Maundeville’, p. 4; see above, p. 174. 159 AU 3, pp 168–9 (AD1450). See above pp 46, 48, 66–7, 73. 160 Quigley & Roberts, Reg. Mey, pp 224–7.

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castle on the river Finn and the border territory of Cenél Múáin for himself, together with the tribute of O’Doherty’s lordship on the peninsula of Inishowen. He awarded the chieftainship of Tír Conaill to Rudraige, son of the slain Nechtain O’Donnell, but gave half of the territory of Tír Conaill to the rebellious sons of Niall Garb.161 Significantly, Henry then proceeded to marry Nechtain’s widow, the daughter of MacWilliam Burke of Mayo, setting aside his current wife, Gormlaith Kavanagh (or MacMurrough Kavanagh), niece of the earl of Ormond, to make way for this new alliance. This was presumably a measure designed to short-circuit the growing influence of the O’Donnell lordship over the chieftains and nobles of north Connacht, but Henry’s decision also carried the implication that he no longer had anything to fear by defying the White Earl of Ormond. Ormond was determined to show that his will was still law in Ireland, and he took his army on an impressive circuitous hosting around the Gaelic lordships of the midlands and north of Ireland from the beginning of July to late August 1452, recovering the castle of Laois from the O’Dempseys (Uí Dimusaig), receiving the submission of O’Conor Faly, lord of Offaly, and achieving the release of de Bermingham, baron of Carbury, county Kildare, who had recently been captured by O’Conor Faly. Ormond then turned north and received submission and military service from O’Farrell of Longford, with further submissions from O’Reilly of Cavan and MacMahon of Monaghan. Then he marched to meet the O’Neills, and forced Henry O’Neill to set aside MacWilliam Burke’s daughter and take back Gormlaith Kavanagh as his legitimate wife. It was an impressive achievement at the end of a long and influential career, but the earl died at Ardee on his way home from this expedition, and all the peace terms he had negotiated between the Irish and the English were nullified by his death.162 According to the order of events recorded in the Annals of Ulster, it was after the death of the earl that Eógan O’Neill invaded county Louth, supported by his vassal-chief, Maguire of Fermanagh. The occasion may well have been the ongoing struggle between the O’Neills and Richard Bellew of Castleroche, county Louth, for possession of the Fews of Armagh, a dispute already mentioned during the submission to York in 1449, and still ongoing in 1457.163 O’Neill was outraged on this expedition to find his own appointee, Áed Rúad MacMahon, chief of Airgialla, took the side of the Anglo-Irish, and even succeeded in killing O’Neill’s constable of the galloglasses, Somairle Mór MacDonald. However the diplomatic Henry, son of Eógan O’Neill, rapidly brought MacMahon in to apologize and submit to his father, the Great O’Neill. 161 AU 3, pp 172–5 (AD1452); AFM 4, pp 964–5, 976–7; ALC 2, pp 160–1. See above, p. 173. 162 Ann. MacFirb., pp 232–3; AFM 4, pp 978–81. 163 Early Statutes II, pp 176–7, 562–3. See above pp 180–1.

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MacMahon agreed to pay compensation not only for the constable’s death, but for the honour of O’Neill, insulted by his vassal’s defiance.164 However, this minor breach of the peace that James, the ‘White Earl’ of Ormond, and his army had imposed between Irish and Anglo-Irish in 1452 was insignificant compared to the political changes that lay ahead for Ulster, partly as a result of the civil strife in England, the ‘Wars of the Roses’, causing a dynastic switch from Lancastrian to Yorkist kings, and partly owing to the unprecedented rise to power of the earls of Kildare in Ireland.

164 AU 3, pp 174–7 (AD1452).

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CHAPTER

6

The Ulster chiefs and the Geraldine chief governors THE EARLDOM OF ULSTER BECOMES VESTED IN THE E N G L I S H   C ROW N

The death of the White Earl, in 1452, added to the complexity of the Irish political scene. His son and heir James Butler, earl of Ormond and Wiltshire, laid claim to the castle and manor of Maynooth, a claim hotly contested by Thomas fitz Maurice Fitzgerald, who won recognition in 1456 as 7th earl of Kildare. Although the new earl of Ormond was absent in England, by 1454 the junior branches of the Butler family had begun a feud with the FitzGeralds over this issue. Their local Anglo-Irish feud became linked to a wider dispute in England. Through his marriage to an English heiress, the earl of Ormond and Wiltshire was now aligned with the Lancastrian camp in the current English political struggles which erupted into the Wars of the Roses, whereas Richard, duke of York, lieutenant of Ireland and earl of Ulster, headed the opposing party, and in 1455 appointed Thomas fitz Maurice Fitzgerald of Kildare as his deputy lieutenant.1 The influence of the Fitzgerald family was greatly strengthened when the duke of York returned to Ireland in October 1459, pursued by the enmity of the Lancastrians, who had him attainted for treason in an English parliament held in Coventry that November. The Dublin parliament of 1460, led by the Fitzgerald earls of Desmond and Kildare, reaffirmed York’s authority, declared English statutes of no effect in Ireland unless confirmed in an Anglo-Irish parliament,2 and facilitated all who wished to join York’s expedition to vindicate his rights in England.3 York himself was slain at the Battle of Wakefield in December 1460, but his eldest son and heir, Edward, went on to win the Battle of Towton in 1461, and seize the throne of England as Edward IV. As Edward also inherited the duke of York’s title of ‘earl of Ulster’, O’Neill now officially held his lands as a direct 1 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 385–6. 2 Art Cosgrove, ‘Parliament and the Anglo-Irish community: the declaration of 1460’ in Art Cosgrove and J.I. McGuire (eds), Parliament and community: papers read before the Irish Conference of Historians, Dublin, 27–30 May 1981, Historical Studies XV (Belfast, 1983), pp 25–41; J.F. Lydon, ‘Ireland and the English crown, 1171–1541’, IHS, 29 (1995), 281–94: 290–2. 3 Lydon, The lordship of Ireland (2nd ed.), pp 209–10; Vincent Gorman, ‘Richard of York and the development of an Irish faction’, PRIA,

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tenant of the English king, a status his grandfather Niall Óc O’Neill had manoeuvred in vain to extract from Richard II. Even more significant for the Geraldines was the execution of James Butler, earl of Ormond and Wiltshire, after Towton, and the confiscation of his earldom. The ill-advised invasion of Waterford by his younger brother John Butler, the future 6th earl of Ormond, in January 1462, and the defeat of the Irish Butlers and their supporters by Thomas Fitzgerald, the ‘Great Earl’ of Desmond, at the Battle of Pilltown, completed the ruin of the Butler family for the time being, by involving the Butlers’ Polestown branch in the attainder, while the Great Earl of Desmond was rewarded with the office of deputy lieutenant of Ireland from April 1463 to October 1467. His term of office, like that of the ‘White Earl’ of Ormond, was marked by his ability to use his alliances with the Irish to the advantage of the colony, though he had a different range of Irish friends, some of them less reliable than others. Conn O’Conor Faly, chief of Offaly, his own brother-in-law, was to defeat and imprison the Great Earl of Desmond in 1466.4 Conn once had another brother-in-law in Niall Garb O’Donnell, king of Tír Conaill (d.1439), who had married his sister, Findguala.5 In 1464, Áed Rúad O’Donnell, the son of Niall Garb and Findguala, and now ruler of Tír Conaill, joined with Richard MacWilliam Burke of Mayo, and a number of other lords and chieftains, to journey to Dublin and cement an alliance with (rann ocus cengal do denam doib fris) the FitzGerald earl of Desmond as justiciar.6 It is noticeable that the annals make no mention of the Great O’Neill in this context, the erstwhile protégé of the White Earl of Ormond, and thus an adherent of the opposing Butler faction. In that same year, Henry O’Neill invaded Tír Conaill in alliance with Áed Rúad’s cousins and rivals, the sons of Nechtain O’Donnell, whereupon Richard MacWilliam Burke brought a fleet of ships northwards to Tír Conaill to assist Áed Ruad’s defence.7 It is a marked feature of the midfifteenth century that wars are no longer between the Irish and the colonists, but between factions of mixed Gaelic and Anglo-Irish origin, led by rival Anglo-Irish earls and barons. The extensive power Henry O’Neill exercised over the other Ulster chiefs, from about 1442 to 1470, owed much to his alliances with Anglo-Irish lords. In 1442, when Henry brought an Anglo-Irish army from Meath to the borders of Donegal to assist his father in subduing Nechtain O’Donnell,8 the White Earl of Ormond had been chief governor, and Baron Richard Nugent, of Delvin in Meath, his trusted associate. Either then or within the next ten years, Henry 85C (1985), 169–79. 4 Art Cosgrove, ‘The execution of the earl of Desmond, 1468’, Journal of the Kerry Archaeological Society, 8 (1975), 11–27: p. 21; Ann. MacFirb., p. 258; AFM 4, pp  1040–3 (AD1466). 5  See above, pp 159, 166. 6  AFM 4, pp 1032–3 (AD1464). For discussion see Katharine Simms, ‘“The king’s friend”: O’Neill, the crown and the earldom of Ulster’ in Eng. & Ire., ed. Lydon, pp 214–36, at pp 225–6. 7 Ann. MacFirb., pp 253–4. 8 Above, p. 173.

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O’Neill had married Ormond’s niece, Gormlaith Kavanagh, by whom he had a son, Henry Óc.9 Archbishop John Mey, who played a role in Henry O’Neill’s inauguration, may have gained his appointment to Armagh in 1443 through Ormond’s support. In turn his successor, Archbishop John Bole, who also treated Henry O’Neill with indulgence, owed his appointment in 1457 to the influence of the new deputy lieutenant, Thomas Fitzgerald, 7th earl of Kildare.10 In 1459, apparently during the governorship of this 7th earl of Kildare, an Anglo-Irish army was sent into Tír Eógain to assist Henry O’Neill to re-take the castle of Omagh from his rebellious nephews, the sons of Art ‘of Omagh’ O’Neill, a show of force that enabled Henry to achieve a peaceful settlement with the sons of Art.11 In eastern Ulster also, Henry O’Neill is found cooperating with lords of Anglo-Irish descent. It appears from events in 1448 and 1450 that the Whites, Savages and MacQuillins looked to the Great O’Neill and his sons for support against the rising power of the O’Neills of Clandeboy.12 About 1452, the office of seneschal of Ulster was given to Janico son of Robert Savage, the first of his surname to be described as ‘captain’ or ‘chieftain’ of his kindred.13 Within the Clandeboy O’Neills, the apparently uninspiring chief Muirchertach Ruad O’Neill was once again politically eclipsed, this time by his younger brother Henry, who succeeded in bringing under his control not only Magennis and MacCartan of county Down, but even the originally Anglo-Irish MacQuillin of the Route. In 1453, Henry O’Neill of Clandeboy brought this allied army to attack the port of Ardglass in county Down. Only the accidental arrival of the Dublin fleet, pursuing some Breton pirates who had kidnapped the archbishop of Dublin, enabled the Savage family to inflict a resounding defeat on the Irish, reputedly killing 520 and taking Henry O’Neill of Clandeboy as prisoner, after which the remnants of the Anglo-Irish colony in Ulster seem to have enjoyed a period of relative calm.14 Eventually Henry, son of Eógan O’Neill, who had been the effective overlord of Ulster for some years, took over his elderly father’s title also, and had himself inaugurated as the Great O’Neill in 1455.15 With the formal approval of Archbishop John Mey, he regularly used the style ‘Prince of the Irish of Ulster’, and on occasion was addressed by the archbishop as ‘Your Excellency’.16 In 1463, Henry issued letters patent by which, ‘considering the devastation and desolation 9 Above p. 184 and below, p. 203. 10 Mario Sughi, ‘The appointment of Octavian de Palatio as archbishop of Armagh, 1477–8’, IHS, 31:122 (1998), 145–64: 156. In 1453, the White Earl’s son, the earl of Ormond and Wiltshire, appointed Archbishop Mey as his deputy lieutenant of Ireland (Cosgrove, ‘Chief governors’, NHI 9, p. 477 and note 85). 11 AU 3, pp 198–9 (AD1459); AFM 4, pp 1004–5. 12 See above, pp 179, 183. 13 Early Statutes II, p. 407; Quigley & Roberts, Reg. Mey, p. 321. 14  AFM 4, pp 986–7; Ann. MacFirb., p. 236. 15 Katharine Simms, ‘The concordat between Primate John Mey and Henry O’Neill, 1455’, Archivium Hibernicum, 34 (1976/7), 71–82. 16 Quigley & Roberts, Reg. Mey, p. 336, no. 323.

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of the most fertile earldom of Ulster, by the unfortunate eruption and invasion of wars and enemies’, he authorized the new archbishop of Armagh, John Bole, to grant safe-conducts in his name to merchants to come and go with their goods ‘through the sea-ports of the earldom aforesaid, on behalf of himself and his other nobles and subjects of the aforesaid earldom’.17 By implication, this document claims for the Great O’Neill de facto authority over the inhabitants of the earldom of Ulster, both Irish and Anglo-Irish. Some official sanction for this stance is suggested when, also in 1463, the annals say that the Yorkist King Edward IV gave the Great O’Neill his livery, the mark of a favoured vassal, consisting of twenty-eight yards of scarlet cloth and a golden collar.18 The same mark of favour was extended to the seneschal of Ulster, Janico Savage, in 1464, along with a grant of £100 from the English exchequer, said to be ‘towards his costis and chargis upon the keping saufgarde and defense of the said Erldome from the daunger and malice of oure Irish ennemyes Englische Rebelles and traitours’.19 Since the Great O’Neill was in high favour, the ‘Irish enemies’ here referred to were presumably the O’Neills of Clandeboy, and the ‘English rebels’, the MacQuillins of the Route. In 1465, Muirchertach Ruad O’Neill, nominal chief of Clandeboy, was yet again displaced by a junior kinsman, his nephew Conn, son of Áed Buide II, who opened a triumphant career by defeating the Scots of the Glens in that year.20 A second payment from King Edward IV to Janico Savage in 1467, totalling £66 10s., was probably elicited by a pathetic letter sent from the seneschal himself and the bishop and people of Down, describing the Anglo-Irish colony in Ulster as living under thralldom and tribute, like the Children of Israel under Pharaoh, attacked by sea and land, by sea from the Bretons and Scots of the Outer Isles, who were allied to the Irish enemies on land, that is O’Neill of Clandeboy [Muirchertach Ruad], O’Cahan, MacQuillin, Henry O’Neill [of Clandeboy, who had escaped from custody in 1455], Conn O’Neill, Magennis, MacCartan and the O’Flynns. The colony were ‘wating daly and nyghtly whanne the said Scottes of the oute Iles of Scotland with the said Irishmen confedered shal utterly distroie them’.21 The seneschal’s petition exaggerates the line-up of enemies facing him. The Scots of the Glens, who had just been defeated by Conn O’Neill of Clandeboy, had no cause to love Conn, and nor had the overshadowed nominal chief of 17 Belfast PRONI Register of Primate John Prene, Lib. i, f. 182r–v. ‘Considerantes fertilissimi comitatus Ultonie per guerrarum et inimicorum infortunatus eventus et incursus devastationem et desolutionem … Henricus Oneyll sue nacionis capitaneus et Hibernicorum Ultonie princeps se pretendens pro se et aliis nobilibus et subditis suis comitatus antedicti … per maritimos portus comitatus supradicti … salvum et securum … prestitit conductum (my  translation). 18  Simms, ‘“The king’s friend”’, p. 225. 19  D.B. Quinn, ‘Guide to English financial records’, Anal. Hib., 10 (1941), 9–69: 29, 42. 20  AU 3, pp 214–15 (AD1465); AFM 4, pp 1036–7. 21 William Reeves, ‘Notice of a record preserved in the Chapter House, Westminster’, PRIA, 5 (1850–3), 132–6: 132–3.

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Clandeboy, Muirchertach Ruad O’Neill. In the following year, it was Janico Savage who took the initiative and invaded the territory of Conn son of Áed Buide II, bringing with him as allies the Scots under MacDonald of the Glens and Muirchertach Ruad O’Neill of Clandeboy, ‘with a grete multitude of people’.22 Conn was outnumbered, but nevertheless won victory at Cave Hill near the modern Belfast by a ruse, killing Janico Savage, whom the annals call ‘lord of Lecale’ [south-east county Down], and taking Muirchertach Ruad as prisoner. The news of this resounding defeat, involving the death of the seneschal of Ulster, caused consternation in Dublin, but Edward IV’s lieutenant in Ireland, Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, could do nothing to relieve the king’s subjects in Ulster because he was fully occupied in dealing with the revolt of the Geraldine faction in the south of Ireland, a revolt stirred up by his own actions.23 For reasons that are not entirely clear,24 in February 1468, Tiptoft had arrested Thomas FitzGerald, the ‘Great Earl’ of Desmond, his kinsman Thomas fitz Maurice FitzGerald, 7th earl of Kildare, and Edward Plunkett, as they were attending parliament at Drogheda where the assembly attainted them for ‘horrible treasons and felonies … as well in alliance, fosterage and alterage with the Irish enemies of the king, as in giving to them horses and harnesses and arms and supporting them against the king’s faithful subjects’.25 Desmond was executed within days, but Kildare managed to break out of prison with the help of his father-in-law, Roland FitzEustace, Lord Portlester, and both joined forces with Desmond’s younger brother Gerald FitzGerald, who had brought an army up from Munster to ravage Meath in revenge for his brother’s death. Their rebellion was reinforced by the plundering troops of O’Conor Faly, chief of Offaly, and MacMurrough Kavanagh, overlord of the Irish in Wicklow and north Wexford. Partial peace was eventually restored by a reversal of Kildare’s attainder, in the same parliament that had earlier condemned him, on condition that he induce the Irish chiefs to end their hostilities also. By the end of August, the king had restored the earl of Desmond’s forfeited lands to his underage son and heir, James Fitzgerald, the future 9th earl, although the earls of Desmond remained deeply distrustful of the English crown and its agents thenceforward, to the point at times of seeking alliance with England’s enemies overseas.26 A subsequent letter of Richard III implies that the Desmond earls even ceased to wear English costume.27 The rapid reversal of their initial prosecution of the Kildare and Desmond Geraldines indicates that the English king and his ministers realized this had been a false move, creating more difficulties than it solved. What originally led 22 I.D. Thornley, England under the Yorkists (London, 1920), p. 258. 23 Thornley, England under the Yorkists, pp 257–8; Ann. Conn., pp 544–5; AU 3, pp 220–1 (AD1468); AFM 4, pp 1056–7 (AD1468). 24 Cosgrove, ‘The execution of the earl of Desmond’. 25 Early Statutes III, p. 465. 26 A.M. McCormack, The earldom of Desmond, 1463–1583: the decline and crisis of a feudal lordship (Dublin, 2005), pp 58–74. 27 James Gairdner (ed.), Letters and papers

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to the arrests remains obscure, whether it was due to a long-term policy of the king himself, or a sudden knee-jerk reaction by Tiptoft.28 However, there was a pattern repeated at intervals during the fifteenth century, whereby the replacement of a powerful Anglo-Irish magnate by a chief governor sent over from England became the signal for increased raiding of English settlements by Irish chieftains. During the lifetime of the White Earl of Ormond, he was explicitly accused of undermining the jurisdiction of Lord Grey in 1427, and may have continued such encouragement of border raids during opponents’ terms of office thereafter.29 Tadc Ó hUiginn’s poem to the White Earl has some suggestive verses: By the wickedness of the Goill [English or ‘foreigners’] he was out of office for a time, and Éire was, as it were, given over to the rule of the nobles of the Gaoidhil [Gaels] … I shall not cease to reproach Séamus Buitilléar until he resolve, when leaving Éire for a time, to leave her in charge of her native princes … Let the Greek Goill be told that, if thou ceasest to protect them, and goest oversea, Éire will run that very night to her armoury … The Goill who will not agree to the Earl being arbiter over them, would if they had not him with them, be lucky to get time to leave the country!30 Similar accusations of encouraging Irish hostilities were to be laid later on against Gerald Mór Fitzgerald, 8th earl of Kildare, and in the parliament of 1495 he was even attainted of high treason, accused of plotting with O’Hanlon and Magennis to ambush and murder his replacement, Sir Edward Poynings. He admitted corresponding with those chieftains while accompanying Poynings on an expedition directed against the Ulster Irish, but claimed it was to persuade them to a bloodless submission, and the chiefs themselves confirmed his story.31 Whether or not we accept this vindication in its entirety, the century-long pattern of accusations connected with surges in border raids by the Irish, on occasions when an English appointee displaced an Anglo-Irish magnate in government, makes it quite credible that the earl of Desmond, when replaced by  Tiptoft in 1467, would have encouraged some Irish chieftains of his illustrative of the reigns of Richard III and Henry VII (2 vols, London, 1861, 1863), 1, pp 67–70. 28 Steven Ellis considers the king was not consulted beforehand. He points to the pre-existing enmity between the earl of Desmond and a faction in Meath led by the bishop, William Sherwood, and has suggested that these Meathmen may have been able to ‘manipulate an inexperienced governor’ (S.G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland: crown, community and the conflict of cultures, 1470–1603 (London and New York 1985), pp 54–5). Art Cosgrove, on the other hand, felt that Edward must have sanctioned at least the arrest, if not the summary execution of Desmond, and that ‘most of the charges against Desmond were probably well-founded’ (Cosgrove, ‘The execution of the earl of Desmond’, p. 25). The truth may lie somewhere in between. 29 Above, pp 166–7, 171, 176–7. 30 Aithd., no. 36, verses 11, 22, 28, 33. 31 G.O. Sayles,

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acquaintance to redouble their raiding activities, and that hostile informants from Meath might have reported this chicanery to Tiptoft as an outright plot to murder him, as Poynings believed of the 8th earl of Kildare in 1495. The fact that the rebel Geraldine forces concentrated their vengeful destruction on the Meath area would indicate they held its inhabitants chiefly responsible for Desmond’s attainder and execution. Tiptoft himself remained as deputy once order was restored but, early in 1470, he returned to England to assist in dealing with a fresh outbreak of the Wars of the Roses, which resulted in the restoration of the Lancastrian king Henry VI for a few months in 1470–1, leading to the execution of Tiptoft himself. When the acting deputy left by Tiptoft, Sir Edmund Dudley, also departed for England in the summer of 1470, the Irish Council elected Thomas fitz Maurice Fitzgerald, 7th earl of Kildare, as justiciar. Kildare continued to serve as justiciar and then deputy under George duke of Clarence, Edward IV’s brother, titular lieutenant of Ireland, both when Clarence was still supporting the Yorkists, and when he deserted to the temporarily victorious Lancastrians. After Edward IV recovered his throne in April 1471, he pardoned the duke of Clarence, who was then reappointed lieutenant, and Kildare continued as his deputy.32

T H E G E R A L D I N E H E G E M O N Y U N D E R T H E YO R K I S T S

This marks the modest beginnings of a three-generation ascendancy of the Kildare Geraldines over the Anglo-Irish government. Although the Lancastrian John Butler, 6th earl of Ormond (d.1477), became reconciled to King Edward IV after the final defeat and death of Henry VI in 1471, he and his brother, Thomas Butler, the 7th earl (d.1515), resided permanently in England thereafter. Since the Desmond Geraldines remained alienated from the crown after the execution of their Great Earl, the earls of Kildare were the most powerful of the remaining Anglo-Irish magnates, and the kings of England were left with a choice between an inexpensive reliance on the Geraldines, who could use their own military resources and political influence to control Ireland in the king’s name, or costly interventions by deputies sent over with an armed escort from England.33 King Edward IV and Richard III, the two sons of Richard, duke of York, earl of March and Ulster, showed an interest from time to time not just in the lordship of Ireland in general, but in their family inheritance in Meath, ‘The vindication of the earl of Kildare from treason 1496’, IHS, 7:25 (1950), 39–47. 32 D.B. Quinn, ‘Aristocratic autonomy, 1460–94’ in NHI 2, pp 591–637, at p. 602. 33 S.G. Ellis, ‘Tudor policy and the Kildare ascendancy in the lordship of Ireland, 1496–1534’, IHS, 20 (1976–7), 235–50: 235, 240.

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Connacht and Ulster. In the earlier part of his reign Edward IV seems to have felt that by maintaining direct links with these areas, he could himself provide a counterbalancing influence to the activities of his semi-independent chief governors in Ireland. We have seen that in 1463 he bestowed his livery on Henry O’Neill, and in Tiptoft’s parliament it was ruled that Meath and Ulster should continue to be administered as separate liberties, even though both were now vested in the crown.34 Consequently, although the Dublin government was seamlessly administered by Thomas fitz Maurice Fitzgerald, 7th earl of Kildare, as justiciar and then chief governor before, during and after the short intermission in Edward IV’s reign, when Henry VI was briefly restored from 3 October 1470 to 11 April 1471, one might look for signs of a greater political impact on the earldom of Ulster. There were indeed disturbances there around that time, though their precise relationship with the English political scene is not clear. The parliament held at Drogheda under Tiptoft, in 1468, had summoned Patrick son of Robert Savage, brother to Janico Savage, the slain seneschal of Ulster, to surrender on charges of ‘extortions, oppressions, larcenies, robberies and taking of pledges’. In the same session,35 two members of the White family, Patrick and Edmund White, were confirmed as keepers of the king’s castles of Greencastle, county Down, and Carlingford Castle, county Louth. As long ago as 1426, Carlingford Castle and the Carlingford ferry had been committed to Lewis and Patrick White, sons of Sir James White, then seneschal of Ulster36 and, in 1448, the same Lewis and Patrick White are found conferring with Henry son of Eógan O’Neill in Ardglass, county Down, apparently seeking the Great O’Neill’s alliance against the O’Neills of Clandeboy.37 The parliamentary summons to Patrick Savage to surrender, which also accused Thomas Lambert, whose name is recorded earlier as Janico Savage’s chosen messenger to Edward IV, suggests that when we find Patrick acting as seneschal of Ulster in 1469, in succession to his brother Janico, this may have been a self-appointment.38 In that year Henry O’Neill invaded the shrunken Anglo-Irish colony in Ulster in alliance with MacQuillin and the Whites. The Whites captured Patrick Savage, and with the support of Henry O’Neill, Patrick White took over the position of seneschal of the earldom; ‘and as many as lived of the Savages were forcibly expelled by them’.39 Given that the Whites were in favour with the Dublin government and Patrick Savage was not, it is conceivable that Henry O’Neill was acting with the approval of Edward IV and Tiptoft. However the installation of Patrick White in Down was only one move in a wider campaign by O’Neill which continued throughout 1470. 34 Early Statutes III, p. 576 and see Early Statutes IV, pp 50–2. 35 Early Statutes III, pp 444, 552. 36 Rot. Canc. Hib., pp 236, no. 60; 237, no. 61. 37 See above, p. 179. 38 Simms, ‘The king’s friend’, pp 229–31; Quinn, ‘Guide to English financial records’, pp 29, 42. 39 AU 3, p. 227 (AD1469).

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By 1470, Henry ‘the Great O’Neill’ was at least in his late sixties.40 Over the previous fifteen years and more, as a result of an ongoing succession dispute in Tír Conaill, between the sons of Niall Garb and Nechtain O’Donnell, and a more muted power struggle within the Clandeboy O’Neills in eastern Ulster, the Great O’Neill of Tír Eógain was enabled to dominate the whole province, justifying the titles he claimed in these years: ‘king over Ulstermen’ (rí for Ulltaib) or ‘Prince of the Irish of Ulster’ (Princeps Hibernicorum Ultonie).41 In 1455, Archbishop John Mey described Henry’s power as extending over the dioceses of ‘Armagh, Clogher, Raphoe, Derry and other places’ and remarked in another letter ‘in these parts of Ulster there exists none greater than you, prince and chieftain of all’.42 Such a form of address is in marked contrast with the fourteenth-century depiction of all Gaelic Irish living beyond the reach of the government as ‘Irish enemies’, when even the archbishop of the day went no further than to address Niall Mór and Niall Óc O’Neill as ‘beloved sons in Christ’.43 However, the years 1470–1 marked a turning-point as the ageing O’Neill found himself simultaneously threatened on his eastern and western borders by the rising power of two younger, militarily able rulers, while internally his authority was challenged by groups of junior kinsmen. In the east, the Clandeboy O’Neills reached a compromise that left the nominal title of chief with the senior kinsman, apparently still the ineffective and now elderly Muirchertach Ruad O’Neill, but transferred all real authority to his aggressive nephew, Conn son Áeda Buide II, victor of the battle at Cave Hill in 1468, where the seneschal Janico Savage was slain (see above, Fig. 18). A scribe in the south of Ireland stated that in the year 1475: ‘The power of Trian Congail [eastern Ulster] was with Conn, son of Áed Buide, son of Brian Ballach, and his father’s brother was the Ó Néill Buide’.44 Power over the whole of ‘Trian Congail’ implied domination of the last descendants of the colonists: MacQuillin of the Route, the Whites in the Dufferin and the Savages in Lecale and the Ards. In 1470, Henry son of Eógan O’Neill launched repeated expeditions into eastern Ulster to support MacQuillin against the attacks of the Clandeboy O’Neills. He succeeded in extracting submission from some lesser nobles of Clandeboy, but Conn son of Áed Buide II had formed an alliance with Henry’s own rebellious nephews, the sons of Art of Omagh. He was also supported by a branch of the MacSweeney galloglass, and had married Maria, daughter of Domnall Ballach MacDonald, lord of the Glens of Antrim. In 1470, Conn retaliated against the Great O’Neill’s attacks by raiding into Tír Eógain. The Savage family returned from exile, ousted the Great O’Neill’s ally Patrick White 40 Simms, ‘The concordat’, p. 71. 41 AU 3, p. 184 (AD1455); Sughi, Reg. Octaviani, p. 37. 42 Quigley & Roberts, Reg. Mey, nos. 323, 379. 43 Katharine Simms, ‘The archbishops of Armagh and the O’Neills’, IHS, 19 (1974), 38–55: 42–3, 46. 44 ‘trén Treana Conghail ag Conn mac Áedha Buidhi mic Briain Bhallaigh & derbrathair a athur ina Húa Néill Buidhi’: Whitley Stokes, ‘The Gaelic Maundeville’, pp 4–5. See above, p. 174.

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from the seneschalcy of Ulster (in practice Lecale and the Ards), and reinstalled Patrick Óc Savage as seneschal. In 1471, the annals say that Conn, son of Áed Buide, was recognized as ruler of all Trian Congail, even by MacQuillin and by his own uncle, the nominal chief of Clandeboy. In 1472, he is found acting as patron of the O’Cahan chiefs of Cianacht and Fir na Craíbe, west of the Bann in north Derry.45 On his western border, Henry son of Eógan O’Neill was losing control over Tír Conaill. Because of its mountainous interior, Tír Conaill had always been very difficult for any overlord, Gaelic or Anglo-Norman, to master, but Henry O’Neill had been taking advantage of the ongoing O’Donnell succession dispute, now supporting the sons of the late Niall Garb II and now the sons of his brother Nechtain, though as the Four Masters remarked, ‘the sons of Nechtain were dearer to him than the sons of Niall’.46 This, if true, may have been because the sons of Niall were more formidable militarily, since they had the support of the hereditary constables of the galloglass in Tír Conaill, the MacSweeney chiefs of Fanad. In 1456, O’Neill had defeated and killed Domnall son of Niall Garb O’Donnell, then ruler of Tír Conaill, and captured his younger brother Áed Ruad, showing his power as overlord by installing Toirdelbach Cairbrech son of Nechtain O’Donnell as king over Tír Conaill instead. However, in 1460, Henry released Áed Ruad, having held him four years in captivity. When Áed predictably gathered his forces and deposed and maimed Toirdelbach Cairbrech in 1461, O’Neill sanctioned his succession to the kingship of Tír Conaill.47 Almost immediately, however, he would have realized his mistake, when O’Donnell supported the rebellion of the sons of Art of Omagh against their uncle Henry, the Great O’Neill, in 1462 (see Fig. 11). In 1464, Henry took advantage of a fresh outbreak of the feud between the sons of Niall Garb and the sons of Nechtain to mount yet another plundering expedition into Tír Conaill, but did not succeed in dislodging Áed Ruad. A peace was patched up, and presumably after the death of Henry’s wife Gormlaith Kavanagh in 1465, the elderly Great O’Neill married Úna, the young daughter of Áed Ruad, and the event was celebrated with a bardic poem, optimistically beginning Ráinig séala ar shíth Uladh48 (‘A seal has been set on the peace of Ulster’). Perhaps in consequence of this pact, O’Donnell joined Henry O’Neill, Maguire of Fermanagh, O’Cahan of north Derry and MacQuillin of the Route in a massed hosting into east Ulster against the Clandeboy O’Neills in the course of 1470. However in 1467, 1468 and 1469, Áed Ruad O’Donnell had already laid the foundations of a separate overlordship in north Connacht, bringing ‘countless’ troops to ravage the county Sligo area and receive hostages, and repeatedly intervening in support of his allies Mac William Burke of Mayo and O’Kelly, 45 AU 3, pp 228–41, 244–7, 330–1 (AD1470, 1471, 1472, 1488). 46 AFM 4, pp 1004–5 (AD1460). 47 AU 3, pp 186–9, 202–5 (AD1456, 1460, 1461). 48 ABM, no. 391.

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against the Burke of Clanricard (south Galway) and O’Brien (county Clare).49 In the winter of 1470–1, Áed Ruad sheltered Henry O’Neill’s rebellious nephews, the sons of Art ‘of Omagh’, while their uncle was besieging Omagh castle itself. Áed Ruad’s own sister Síle, who was married to Niall son of Art ‘of Omagh’ O’Neill, had been left in charge of the castle’s defence, and it is a testimony to the courage and military skill she apparently shared with her brother, that the siege dragged on for six months before the sons of Art eventually submitted to Henry, and surrendered the castle, which was then handed over to Henry’s eldest son and heir, Conn Mór O’Neill, and we are told ‘peace was made by Ó Néill and Ó Domnaill according to the wishes of Ó Néill’.50 Within a year however, they were again at war. Because of Ulster’s geographical characteristics – the relative isolation of the province as a whole by the surrounding sea, and the wooded drumlins stretching along its land border, along with the internal divisions marked by the Upper and Lower Bann and Lough Neagh in the east, and the river Foyle and the intractable mountains of Donegal in the west – there was a continuous tension throughout its history between the efforts of rulers based in the central plains to dominate the whole, and a tendency to tripartition. The central period of Henry’s reign had seen him dominate the whole province, even when he was not in complete control, but his closing years saw the tendency to tripartition reemerge (see Plates X and XI). The success of the Clandeboy O’Neills in bringing the other territories east of the Bann into subjection, converted them from local rulers to a regional overlordship, with the resources to pose a serious challenge to the Great O’Neill. In the same way, Áed Ruad O’Donnell’s overlordship of north Connacht supplied the wealth and manpower previously lacking to empower the agriculturally poor territory of Tír Conaill. In 1474, the Annals of Connacht record ‘A great war between O Neill, O Domnaill and the Clann Áeda Buide this year, and they did great damage to each other’.51 The more detailed account in the other annals tells of major plundering raids by the Great O’Neill into Tír Áeda (barony of Tirhugh, county Donegal) and An Tuaiscert (north county Antrim) from which he ‘returned safe to his house’, but there is no mention of submission and hostages from his opponents. As his dominance was seen to ebb, Henry found himself struggling to retain even the obedience of long-standing vassal territories. His most faithful ally, Tomás Óc Maguire, ruler of Fir Manach, had retired in 1471, passing on the 49 Ann. Conn., pp 536–7, 542–5, 548–9 (AD1467, 1468, 1469). 50 AU 3, pp 236–9 (AD1470, 1471); Ann. Conn., pp 556–7 (AD1471). 51 ‘Cocad mor etir O Neill & h. Domnaill & Clainn Oeda Buide in hoc anno & milled mor leo for a chele’, Ann. Conn., pp 570–1 (AD1474). AU 3, pp 250–1 has almost identical wording, but Mac Carthy has changed the punctuation to imply that Ó Néill and [Conn] mac Áeda Buide were in alliance, despite the subsequent information that Ó Néill attacked Conn. AFM 4, pp 1086–7 has a discrepancy between text and translation

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chieftaincy to his son Émonn or Edmund Maguire, whose reign was marked by controversy and disorder.52 In 1475 Áed Rúad O’Donnell went on a triumphal circuitous hosting through all territories to the south of Tír Conaill over which he could claim influence. His army consisted not only of the fighting-men of Tír Conaill, and his long-standing subordinate allies, O’Rourke of west Breifne and the chieftains from the Sligo area, but also Toirdelbach, son of Philip Maguire, a leader in west Fir Manach.53 This combined force entered east Breifne, the territory of O’Neill’s ally, Toirdelbach son of Seaán O’Reilly, and forced this chief to give a hostage and liberate his rival, Brian son of Feilim O’Reilly, who was a political associate (fear rainn & pairte) of O’Donnell. From thence, O’Donnell’s army entered the O’Farrell lordship of Angaile or Longford, where Áed Ruad again had a group of supporters in the sons of Irial O’Farrell whom he favoured, while plundering the lands of the reigning chief there. O’Donnell and his followers were then invited to enter Offaly by its ruler, his kinsman Cathair O’Conor Faly, and to join that chief in plundering both the Irish and Anglo-Irish of West Meath. Again O’Donnell had a supporter within the O’Melaghlin dynasty who was not the reigning chief, and at the request of this adherent he demolished two of O’Melaghlin’s castles and defeated that chief in battle. On the same campaign, he burned Delvin Castle, took black-rent from Mullingar town and received submission from the Anglo-Irish Dillons and Daltons, who occupied the surrounding countryside. Some junior branches of the O’Kelly dynasty of east Galway provided boats to take the army westwards over the Shannon and O’Donnell brought his army back across Connacht unopposed to his homeland.54 Henry O’Neill then entered Fir Manach and burned down the house of Toirdelbach, son of Philip Maguire, presumably as punishment for changing his allegiance to O’Donnell.55 The gesture was insufficient to re-establish his prestige: the same southern scribe who wrote in 1475 that Conn son of Áeda Buide II held ‘the power of Trian Congail’ also described Áed Ruad O’Donnell as ‘Húa Domnaill, and he had the power of Lower [northern] Connacht’, whereas Henry son of Eógan is simply styled ‘Húa Néill’.56 A poem addressed to Áed Rúad shortly after his attack on Delvin asked Cia ré’r fuirgeadh Feis Teamhra? ‘Who is it for whom Tara’s nuptial feast has been delayed?’ The poet complained that Ireland had long been single and it was time she had a husband, a high-king. Áed Rúad O’Donnell was qualified because he was the choice of the Grecian host (rogha tshlóigh ghégmhara Ghrég), perhaps a reference to his alliance with the Great Earl of Desmond in 1464, since the at this point, leading to the same misapprehension. 52 Peadar Livingstone, The Fermanagh story (Enniskillen, 1969), pp 32–3. 53 In AFM 4, pp 1092–3 (AD1475) we are told that Maguire himself, i.e., Edmund, was on this expedition, but this may be an error for Toirdelbach son of Philip. 54 AFM 4, pp 1092–7 (AD1475). 55 AU 3, pp 254–7 (AD1475). 56 Stokes, ‘The Gaelic Maundeville’, pp 4–5. See above p. 174.

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learned classes referred to the Geraldines as Greeks. Traditionally, the poet recalls, the Cenél Conaill were said to have supplied ten high-kings over Ireland, Áed Rúad would be the eleventh; the five provincial kings cannot rival him – the king of Ulaid (i.e., O’Neill of Clandeboy?) has given his hand into O’Donnell’s hand in homage, the Leinstermen cannot oppose him (because his mother was an O’Connor Faly?), the king of Munster yielded submission without being requested, the king of Connacht has put his hostages into O’Donnell’s hands, when will Ireland’s crown surround his head?57 The 1470s were clearly a period of power struggle. O’Neill continued to invade Tír Conaill against O’Donnell, raid Trian Congail against the Clandeboy O’Neills and even march on Airgialla against MacMahon, and won what are described by the annals, especially the Annals of Ulster, as military victories, but there is no record of his opponents yielding hostages and submission. On the contrary, they responded with retaliatory attacks, in alliance with his rebellious nephews, the sons of Art ‘of Omagh’ and the sons of Feilim (another son of Eógan O’Neill).58 To strengthen his hand in these circumstances, the Great O’Neill increased his reliance on his English or Anglo-Irish connections. His earlier link to the Butler family was now of no use, and it is interesting that by temporarily putting away his wife Gormlaith Kavanagh, in 1452, he had defied James Butler, the White Earl, even before that magnate’s death. In 1459, the Anglo-Irish army that accompanied Henry to re-take the castle of Omagh from the rebellious sons of Art was presumably sent or sanctioned by Thomas Fitzgerald, 7th earl of Kildare, as deputy lieutenant. However in 1474, O’Neill went directly to the top. In that year, the Rolls of the Tellers of the English exchequer record a reward paid to the emissary of ‘the great lord called Henry Oneyll, the king’s friend’.59 This deputation from O’Neill to Edward IV may be connected to the dramatic grant the king had made to Henry, Lord Grey, on 12 March 1473, of Lecale and the Ards in county Down for forty years with all appurtenances including the fisheries of the Bann, ‘all of which premises are parcel of the king’s earldom of Ulster’. Lord Grey was also given a life grant of the seneschalcy of Ulster, which had been the subject of such an unseemly dispute between the Whites and Savages in 1470–1. More significantly the grant added ‘if any other castles, lordships, manors and lands in the said north part of Ireland shall be reduced by him to the king’s obedience, he and his assigns shall hold the same until he shall be reasonably recompensed and he shall have custody and governance of the same for life with the accustomed fees’.60 In the event, Lord Grey does not appear to have taken any practical steps to make good this ‘licence to conquer’, but news of the king’s intentions are likely to have reached the Anglo-Irish 57 J.G. O’Keeffe ed., ‘Poems on the O’Donnells (1200–1600)’ in Ir. Texts II (1931), pp 96– 103, poem no. 21. 58 AU 3, pp 258–61, 266–7; AFM 4, pp 1098–1103, 1110–13 (AD1476, 1477, 1479). 59  Quinn, ‘Guide to English financial records’, p. 30. 60  Cal. pat. rolls

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inhabitants of Lecale and the Ards. The Great O’Neill could have then learned of it through his allies, the Whites, and have seen an opportunity to offer his services against the Clandeboy O’Neills. The ineffective grant to Lord Grey was only one aspect of a new determination on the part of Edward IV to take more control in Ireland now that he was no longer threatened by a Lancastrian resurgence. Later in 1473, he sent a deputation from England headed by Sir Gilbert Debenham who held detailed discussions with the Irish Council and the parliament, as to the best method of ensuring ‘the relef and socour of his said land’, and brought back their response. Apart from an unrealistic assurance that the whole of Ireland could be reconquered and turned to profit if the king would only send over the duke of Clarence with a force 1000 archers, since Ireland had been conquered previously in the twelfth century by a mere handful of knights, the parliament’s message to the king contained two interesting points. One concerned the threat posed to the king’s authority by the continuing influx of Scottish settlers to the MacDonald lordship of the Glens of Antrim, with a sinister reminder of the earlier Bruce invasion of 1315–18. The other was a request for the king to confirm the Irish parliament’s recent grant of ‘tonnage and poundage’, that is, a shilling tax on every pound’s worth of merchandise imported or exported from Ireland. This tax had been instituted to finance the ‘Fraternity of Arms’, a cooperative military force established by the same Irish parliament in the spring of 1474, consisting of 120 archers, 40 cavalry and 40 pages, in other words, a standing army, under the control of a council of 13, which included Thomas Fitzgerald, 7th earl of Kildare, then deputy lieutenant, Sir Roland FitzEustace, whose daughter Alice had married the earl’s son, the future 8th earl, Gerald Mór FitzGerald, and the mayors of Dublin and Drogheda for the time being.61 The inclusion of the mayors, who were thus cooperating with the impost on trade in exchange for a stable defence force and some input into its deployment, presents a certain parallel between this ‘Fraternity’ and the hermandad of Castile, a union under oath of town procurators and lesser nobility for the control of outlaws and unruly magnates, revived during the disturbed reign of Henry IV of Castile (1454–74), to be reformed as an arm of the state by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1476.62 The Irish ‘Fraternity’ was itself a continuation in a more regular and permanent form, and on a better financial footing, of a temporary force set up by the previous parliament of 1472, largely under the control of Geraldine magnates and their supporters, with no mention of the mayors. As Steven Ellis points out, the date of the ‘Fraternity’ legislation implies that it was passed in consultation with the king’s envoy, Gilbert Debenham.63 Yet the Edw. IV, Hen. VI, 1467–77, p. 395. 61 J.T. Gilbert, History of the viceroys of Ireland (Dublin and London, 1865), p. 396. 62 T.F. Ruiz, ‘Hermandades’ in J.R. Strayer (ed.), Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 6 (New York, 1985), pp 209–10. 63 S.G. Ellis, Ireland in the age of the Tudors, 1447–1603 (London and New York, 1995), p. 72.

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request that the king himself should confirm this already passed legislation suggests that there had been opposition raised to the setting up of this permanent army, perhaps because it was seen as strengthening the Geraldine faction.64 Next year, Thomas, earl of Kildare was replaced as deputy by the antiGeraldine Bishop Sherwood of Meath, who promptly abolished both the poundage tax and the Fraternity. The bishop however, lost his title to authority as deputy when the absentee lieutenant of Ireland, George, duke of Clarence, was executed for treason in February 1478. In the interregnum, the Irish Council elected Thomas, 7th earl of Kildare, as justiciar, and when he died three weeks later, the Council elected his son Gerald FitzGerald, 8th earl of Kildare, as justiciar, whereas King Edward named Lord Henry Grey deputy lieutenant, perhaps calculating that this position of authority would enable him to make good his forty-year grant of the colonies in Ulster. An unedifying struggle for control between these two appointees ensued, and a compromise was eventually mediated by the king, whereby the young earl Gerald was appointed deputy lieutenant, but his old opponent, the bishop of Meath, was made chancellor of Ireland, and a selection of ordinances from each of two rival sessions of parliament were confirmed.65 Kildare was to retain the chief governorship of Ireland under various titles from October 1479 to May 1492. In the parliament that he held 1479–80, the Fraternity of Arms (Guild of St George) was re-founded with even more Geraldine supporters among its council of 13, and the poundage tax that supported it was re-imposed. Steven Ellis has remarked that the 1480s saw a marked decline in raids against the four loyal counties of the English Pale, and a gradual extension of the earl’s control outwards into the surrounding marches.66 Another enactment of the 1479–80 parliament was to grant English status at law to Conn Mór, the son and heir of Henry the Great O’Neill, and to any issue of his marriage to Eleanor, sister to the deputy lieutenant Gerald Mór FitzGerald, earl of Kildare.67 This marriage alliance between the most powerful Gaelic and Anglo-Irish dynasties in Ireland bore immediate fruit, when Gerald Mór brought his forces northwards to aid Conn Mór to besiege the castle of Cennaird (Caledon, county Tyrone), which was being defiantly held by Seaán Buide O’Neill, another younger brother of Henry, the Great O’Neill. Although the siege itself was unsuccessful, it seems to have alarmed Seaán Buide sufficiently to induce him to come to terms after Kildare’s force had withdrawn. Similarly Áed Rúad O’Donnell, who had been raiding into Tír Eógain as far as the Clogher Valley, in alliance with the rebellious sons of Art and sons of Feilim O’Neill, was reined in when Conn Mór espoused the cause of the sons of Nechtain O’Donnell in a fresh feud. Áed Rúad consented to a peace treaty with 64 Donough Bryan, Gerald FitzGerald, the Great Earl of Kildare, 1456–1513, ed. Edmund Curtis (Dublin and Cork, 1933), pp 23–4. 65 Ellis, Tudor Ireland, pp 59–64. 66 Ibid., p. 65; Bryan, Gerald FitzGerald, pp 51–4. 67 Early Statutes IV, pp 786–7.

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Conn, which included granting the post of tánaiste or deputy-leader of Tír Conaill to Éicnechán son of Nechtain O’Donnell.68 The Great O’Neill’s status as overlord seemed on the way to being restored. The next year proved this to be an illusion. One is reminded of the dictum of the ‘Testament of Morainn’ that a ruler maintained in power with hosts from outside has a weak, fleeting lordship. When the troops leave, respect and fear of him ebb away.69 Seaán Buide O’Neill deserted to join the rebellious sons of Art ‘of Omagh’ and sons of Feilim, and together they made war on Henry’s sons. In eastern Ulster, Conn, son Áed Buide II O’Neill, lord of Clandeboy, blinded and castrated Patrick Savage, who was probably still operating as ‘seneschal of Ulster’. Even more dramatically, the Clandeboy O’Neills captured Conn Mór, son of Henry the Great O’Neill, and handed him over to Áed Rúad O’Donnell, who kept him in captivity for the next two years until, in 1483, Henry ransomed his son and then retired from the chieftainship to allow Conn Mór to be inaugurated as the Great O’Neill ‘by the will of his father and all Tír Eógain’. The war with Áed Rúad O’Donnell immediately recommenced,70 and the fact that one of the retaliatory raids westwards against O’Donnell was led by Domnall Clárach O’Neill, may suggest that this other son of Henry had been appointed tánaiste with the traditional responsibility for west Tír Eógain that earlier second-in-commands had borne.71 He was to figure subsequently as the natural and legitimate heir of Conn Mór. That same year O’Donnell joined with Áed Óc O’Neill of Clandeboy, who had succeeded his brother Conn (d.1482) as chief of the Clandeboy O’Neills, and together they burned Dundalk, and then O’Donnell attacked the town of Louth. The earl of Kildare brought an army to pursue the raiders, and a battle took place in which MacQuillin was slain, significantly while fighting in the service of the Clandeboy O’Neills.72 The MacQuillin family had begun as Anglo-Irish mercenary captains, an identity still visible when in 1449 Jenkin or Seinicín MacQuillin submitted to the duke of York separately from the leaders of the Ulster Irish,73 but by the end of the fifteenth century the degree to which they were becoming ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’ is suggested by the names of two successive heads of the lineage, Cormac (d.1472) and Rudraige MacQuillin (d.1472).74 From the point of view of the Great O’Neill, there were two drawbacks to his alliance with the Geraldines. Since the earl’s goal was to acquire island-wide 68 AU 3, pp 270–3 (AD1480). 69 ‘Flaith congbála co sluagaib dianechtair, gnáth flaith lobur élaithech do suidiu. Amal soite a shlúaig úad, soid a grád & a gráin for cúlu’. Rudolf Thurneysen (ed.), ‘Morands Fürstenspiegel’, ZCP, 11 (1917), 56–106: 86, 105. This is version A. Version B as edited and translated by Fergus Kelly reads, ‘The ruler of occupation with hosts from outside; his forces turn away, they put off his needs, for a prosperous man does not turn outside(?)’, Fergus Kelly (ed.), Audacht Morainn (Dublin, 1976), p. 19. 70 AU 3, pp 276–7, 280–3 (AD1481, 1483). 71 See above, pp 130, 154. 72 AFM 4, pp 1124–5 (AD1483). 73 See above, p. 180. 74 AFM 4, pp 1076–9; AU 3, pp 244–7 (AD1472).

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control for the English government or indeed for himself, Gerald Mór, like the White Earl of Ormond before him, was better suited by a threefold division of power in Ulster rather than a strongly unified province dominated by O’Neill alone. In 1484, Richard III wrote approvingly that the marriage of Kildare’s sister to Conn Mór strengthened the king’s chances of recovering rights he had inherited with the earldom of Ulster, but he also urged Earl Gerald to open negotiations with O’Donnell, if he could persuade him to submit ‘either to be his liegeman or true peax man’.75 In the Great Earl’s later years, Áed Ruad O’Donnell was to be his principal ally in Ulster, and was foster-father to his short-lived son, Henry FitzGerald.76 Conn Mór O’Neill’s marriage to Eleanor, in 1480, also meant that his fortune became inextricably linked with that of Kildare and the Geraldine faction. When they suffered a set-back, so would he.

U L S T E R A N D T H E G E R A L D I N E S U N D E R L A N C A S T R I A N RU L E

Geraldine dominance came under threat when, in England, the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 caused power to transfer from the Yorkist dynasty, who had patronized the Geraldines, to the Lancastrian king, Henry VII, Henry Tudor. At first the Tudor king concentrated on establishing his power in England, and allowed Earl Gerald to continue in the chief governorship of Ireland, even when he supported the crowning of the Yorkist pretender Lambert Simnel in 1487.77 In the words of Steven Ellis: ‘the maintenance of Kildare as deputy gave political stability to the lordship at no cost to the king; though it meant allowing the earl a far greater measure of autonomy than the Tudors would have tolerated in an English office-holder’.78 The unprecedented influence exercised by Earl Gerald over the major chieftains of Ulster was demonstrated in 1491 when Áed Ruad O’Donnell and Conn Mór O’Neill appealed to the earl to arbitrate their disputes. This was a landmark in Ulster history, because while chieftains had submitted to English kings and their chief governors on numerous occasions before, it had almost always been in the face of force, or a threat of force. In 1464 Áed Ruad O’Donnell had indeed voluntarily travelled up to Dublin to meet the ‘Great Earl’ of Desmond, Thomas Fitzgerald, then deputy lieutenant, but the annals say this was to seal an alliance (rann ocus cengal) with the deputy, implying military cooperation on a footing of equality. That O’Neill and O’Donnell should ask the earl of Kildare to judge between them implies a voluntary recognition of his de iure authority over them as chief governor of Ireland. It set a precedent, later followed by a number of such appeals from O’Neill and 75 Gairdner, Letters and papers … Richard III and Henry VII, 1, p. 71. 76 Richard Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors (3 vols, London, 1885–90), 1, pp 119–20; Bryan, Gerald FitzGerald, p. 92. 77  Ellis, Tudor Ireland, pp 68–72. 78  Ellis, ‘Tudor policy and the Kildare ascendancy’, 240.

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O’Donnell to the 9th earl of Kildare’s mediation as lord deputy.79 Even in 1543 Magnus O’Donnell and Conn Bacach O’Neill submitted their disputes to the arbitration of a later chief governor, Sir Anthony St Leger, again recognizing the legitimate authority of the Dublin government. As it happens, the 1491 arbitration did not result in a peaceful settlement, but the fact that both leaders voluntarily journeyed to the earl’s presence to lay their respective cases before him80 indicates greater acceptance of Kildare’s authority than had earlier been achieved by James Butler, the White Earl of Ormond. James Butler had also been linked by marriage to a Great O’Neill, since his niece, Gormlaith Kavanagh, was married to Conn’s father, Henry son of Eógan O’Neill. Gormlaith became mother to Henry’s son, Henry Óc O’Neill,81 but was not the mother of his elder son, Conn Mór, and this was shortly to have fatal consequences for Conn. With perhaps overweening confidence, Earl Gerald, having been forgiven by Henry Tudor for his rash decision in 1487 to crown the Yorkist pretender, Lambert Simnel, as King Edward VI, in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, was rumoured to be involved in a fresh Yorkist plot in favour of another pretender to the throne, Perkin Warbeck, in 1491. He failed to take action against his kinsman, Maurice fitz Thomas Fitzgerald, 10th earl of Desmond, who was certainly involved with Warbeck. The earlier alliance sealed in 1464 between Áed Rúad O’Donnell and Earl Maurice’s father, the subsequently executed Thomas, ‘Great Earl’ of Desmond (d.1468), apparently still had influence, and drew O’Donnell into the Warbeck conspiracy. Áed Rúad travelled to Scotland in the summer of 1495 and formed an alliance (comhaontu) with King James IV, a chief supporter of the Warbeck pretender.82 The economical Henry VII, rather than finance a major military expedition to Ireland to bring the over-mighty Geraldines back under royal control, instead tried encouraging the Butlers to undermine the Geraldine network of influence from within. Thomas Butler, the 7th earl of Ormond, a Lancastrian supporter, had already been pardoned by the Yorkist King Edward IV in 1477, but was restored to his English lands and full royal favour with Henry VII’s victory at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. He resided on his English estates, leaving the management of his Irish lands to his cousin, James, son of Edmund ‘Mac Richard’ Butler of Polestown, who at his death in 1487 bequeathed this control of the Butler lands in Ireland to his son Piers Rúad, foster-child and son-in-law of Gerald Mór FitzGerald, 8th earl of Kildare.83 79 AFM 5, pp 1370–1, 1378–81 (AD1524, 1525, 1526). 80 AFM 4, pp 1186–7 (AD1491). 81 See poem ‘Mairg danab oighreacht Éire’, ABM, no. 309, verses 38, 43. 82 AFM 4, pp 1214–15 (AD1495); Simon Egan, ‘James IV, the O’Donnells of Tyrconell and the road to Flodden’ in History Ireland, 24 (Nov./Dec. 2016), 16–19: 18; idem, ‘An Irish context to a Scottish disaster’ in Joseph Mannion and Katharine Simms (eds), Politics, kinship and culture in Gaelic Ireland, c.1100–c.1690 (Dublin, 2018), pp 10–16, at pp 13–14; Norman MacDougall, James IV (East Linton, 1997), pp 116–17. 83 Piers’ marriage to Margaret FitzGerald took

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Both Earl Thomas of Ormond and Henry VII were unhappy with this tendency towards subordination of the Irish Butler faction to the Geraldine interest, potentially giving Kildare a monopoly of power. The advent of the Yorkist pretender Perkin Warbeck made it still more urgent to reduce the influence of the Yorkist Geraldines. Earl Thomas appointed his illegitimate nephew Sir James Ormond to administer his Irish lands, and the king appointed Sir James treasurer of Ireland and then joint governor in 1492–3. It is surely no coincidence that at the height of Sir James Ormond’s influence in the Dublin government, the ‘Geraldine’ O’Neill, Conn Mór, brother-in-law to the Great Earl of Kildare, was assassinated in 1493 by his younger half-brother Henry Óc, kinsman of the Butlers through his mother Gormlaith Kavanagh, niece of the White Earl of Ormond. Henry Óc then had himself instituted as the new Great O’Neill by the traditional inaugurators, O’Cahan, his principal vassal-chief, and O’Mellan, keeper of St Patrick’s Bell.84 His inaugural bardic poem survives, justifying his fratricide: ‘Woe to him whose inheritance is Ireland … I am certain whichever of you has best right to the land of Ireland will not obtain union with her inheritance until his harshness is joined to that right. Power is not won without peril.’85 The poet goes on to cite the Brehon law maxim that a betterqualified junior candidate for kingship takes precedence over the elder heir. Meanwhile Áed Rúad O’Donnell, staunch supporter of the Geraldines, nominated an older brother, Domnall Clárach, as a rival ‘Great O’Neill’. The Four Masters add that O’Donnell on this occasion took hostages from all Tír Eógain except Henry Óc’s inaugurators, O’Cahan and O’Mellan. However later that year in a battle between the two claimants at Glasdrummond (south county Armagh), Henry Óc soundly defeated his brother Domnall Clárach, and retained power for the time being.86 It became obvious to King Henry VII that pitting one Anglo-Irish faction against another was setting the country on the high-road to civil war. In September 1494, he appointed Sir Edward Poynings lord deputy, with a group of English-born officials to man the king’s council in Ireland. Poynings arrived in October of that year and immediately joined forces with Sir James Ormond and Gerald, 8th earl of Kildare, on an expedition into Ulster, apparently to bring O’Donnell and his allies to heel,87 a purpose for which they could reasonably expect armed assistance from Henry Óc O’Neill. However the Geraldines’ network of influence among the Ulster chiefs was not limited to Áed Rúad O’Donnell and the murdered Conn Mór O’Neill. During the expedition Kildare sent messages to Máelechlainn O’Hanlon of place in 1485 (David Beresford, ‘Butler, Piers Ruadh’ in DIB, 2, pp 164–5). 84 AFM 4, pp 1200–1 (AD1493); Gilbert, History of the viceroys, pp 443–8. 85 ‘Mairg danab oíghrecht Éire … / Gibé dhíbh is deimhin liom . as ferr cert ar íath nEirionn / go ccuire a crúaidh leisin ccert . ní fhuighi(dh) úain dá hoigreacht. / Gan ghúasacht ní gabhtur nert’ (ABM, no. 309, verses 1, 4, 5 – my translation). 86 AFM 4, pp 1200–5. 87 See Gilbert, History of the

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Airthir in south Armagh and Áed Magennis of Uib Ethach (barony of Iveagh, south county Down). His opponents accused the earl of having ‘sent his men and servants to comfort, aid and assist O’Hanlon, the king’s Irish enemy, and to fight against the said deputy, and over that conspired with the king’s Irish enemies to have murdered and slain the said deputy in the said O’Hanlon’s country at the time of his being there’. When Poynings learned of these accusations the expedition was abandoned, and Kildare, who had fled, was eventually arrested in February 1495 and sent a prisoner to England, while the Irish parliament under Poynings attainted him for treason.88 In June 1496, both O’Hanlon and Magennis publicly swore on the gospels that Kildare’s communications with them were merely to urge them to abandon their hostilities and submit to Poynings, and they alleged they would not have submitted otherwise. This vindication of the earl, true or not, was just as impressive an illustration of his personal influence over the Ulster Irish as his opponents’ claim that he had urged them to war. By then the vindication was a mere formality. King Henry VII had already decided to restore Kildare’s position. An English parliament reversed the earl’s attainder in 1495, and in August 1496 he was returned to power as lord deputy and ruled Ireland in that capacity to his death in 1513. The difference was that Earl Gerald had left his son and heir, Gerald Óc, behind in the English court, effectively as a hostage, but also for acculturation, and Geraldine control of the personnel of the king’s council in Ireland and the Anglo-Irish parliament was significantly reduced by Poynings’ Laws, forbidding life appointments of royal officials and insisting that the contents of all legislation in the Anglo-Irish parliament must receive prior approval from the king.89 These safeguards were designed to prevent a recurrence of Yorkist conspiracies, but within Ireland the earl’s network of influence over Irish and Anglo-Irish magnates was largely unaffected. In September 1496 Domnall Clárach O’Neill, O’Donnell’s candidate for the kingship of Tír Eógain, met Earl Gerald at Dundalk, and with the MacMahons, Magennis, O’Reilly and O’Hanlon agreed to an indenture of fealty and submission, and gave his eldest son as a hostage.90 By that date Domnall had conducted no less than 24 raids against his rival Henry Óc without success, and in 1495 Magennis, O’Hanlon, and Gilla Pátraic, son of the blind chief Áed Óc MacMahon, had joined Henry Óc O’Neill’s army in an attempt to force submission from Maguire. But the favourable attitude of Earl Gerald as lord deputy strengthened Domnall Clárach’s position. In the late spring of 1497 Henry Óc gave Domnall ‘great gifts’ of horses and armour to induce him to abandon his claim to kingship, and released his son without ransom. Then in July Earl Gerald’s son-in-law, Piers viceroys, p. 450. 88 Sayles, ‘The vindication of the earl of Kildare’, 40–2. See above, p. 191. 89  Bryan, Gerald FitzGerald, p. 84; Ellis, Tudor Ireland, pp 77–82. 90  Bryan, Gerald FitzGerald, p. 211; Agnes Conway, Henry VII’s relations with Scotland and Ireland, 1485–98

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Ruad Butler killed Henry Óc’s potential supporter, Sir James Ormond, bringing the Butler faction in Ireland back under Geraldine influence.91 Initially Henry Óc did not seem disadvantaged by Sir James’ death. Now that his rivalry with his older brother Domnall Clárach was settled, he was in a fair way to dominate Ulster. The long-term Geraldine supporter, Áed Rúad O’Donnell, was temporarily weakened through a power-bid by his ambitious son Conn. Conn O’Donnell’s grievance was that in 1480 the long-standing feud between the sons of Niall Garb O’Donnell (including Áed Rúad himself) and the sons of Niall Garb’s brother Nechtain had been settled through the mediation of the late Conn Mór O’Neill by appointing Éicnechán, leader of the sons of Nechtain, as Áed Rúad’s tánaiste or deputy-leader, with a possible right of succession. As Áed Rúad grew older (he was born c.1427/8),92 the question of succession rights became more pressing, and early in 1497 the impatient prince Conn assassinated Éicnechán in his father’s stronghold. This only brought the succession dispute closer to home, principally between the two most prominent of Áed Rúad’s sons, Conn, whose mother was a daughter of O’Neill (Henry son of Eógan, d.1489), and his brother, Áed Óc or Áed Dub (‘A. junior’ or ‘A. the black-haired’), whose mother was a daughter of O’Brien (Conchobar na Sróna, d.1496). On 26 May Áed Rúad resigned his throne ‘in consequence of the dissensions of his sons’, and Conn was inaugurated as O’Donnell within the week. However the Four Masters remark that the O’Donnells’ ‘neighbours and borderers … began to resist their authority, by reason of the contests of O’Donnell’s sons with each other’. The elegy for the murdered Éicnechán son of Nechtain begins ‘The strength of the Irish is an ebbing tide … I weep for the land of Úna on which, while she was gathering her strength, a flood of envy broke’.93 Conn O’Donnell imprisoned his brother Áed, then undertook a great expedition to assert his power over northern Connacht, long tributary to his father, Áed Rúad. There he suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of MacDermot, O’Conor Don and O’Conor Roe, with the imprisonment of a number of his galloglass leaders, and, as ultimate humiliation, the capture of the Cathach, the psalter of St Columba, the most venerated battle-relic of the O’Donnells. Taking advantage of this time of weakness, Henry Óc O’Neill brought an ‘immense army’ on an invasion of Tír Conaill, where he confronted and slew Conn, the newly created O’Donnell. Thereafter the old Áed Rúad resumed the title of ‘O’Donnell’ once more. He offered to yield power to Áed Óc, his son by O’Brien’s daughter, but this dutiful son refused to take the lead, instead ruling in partnership with his father, and Tír Conaill gradually recovered unity and strength. (Cambridge, 1932), pp 232–4. 91 Beresford, ‘Butler, Piers Ruadh’, DIB, p. 164. 92 AU records Áed Rúad’s birth under the year 1429, but states he was in his 78th year when he died in 1505. 93 ‘Tuile ar dtrághadh tréan Gaedheal’, ed. Lambert McKenna, ‘Some Irish bardic poems’, Studies, 39 (1950), 438–44, verses 1, 5.

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Although Henry Óc, the Great O’Neill, was supreme within Ulster, he had now no political supporter outside the province, unlike his rivals. On 21 June 1498, he was killed by Toirdelbach and Conn Bacach O’Neill, the young sons of Eleanor Fitzgerald and Conn Mór, in revenge for the assassination of their father five years earlier. Domnall Clárach O’Neill, the older brother who had already been inaugurated in opposition to Henry Óc in 1493, with the support of Áed Rúad O’Donnell, now besieged Dungannon Castle, the chief seat of the O’Neills, but was soundly defeated by Henry Óc’s son Felim. At that point Áed Rúad O’Donnell and Maguire joined Toirdelbach son of Conn Mór O’Neill in appealing for the intervention of Toirdelbach’s uncle, the earl of Kildare. Earl Gerald arrived with the cannon he controlled as lord deputy, met and allied with Domnall Clárach, the new Great O’Neill, took Dungannon Castle by force and then advanced on Omagh Castle to take hostages and submission from the sons of Art ‘of Omagh’ O’Neill, who had been supporters of Henry Óc, after which, as the annals say, ‘those hosts returned to their houses with triumph of victory’.94 This last phrase has real importance, because the annalists are not presenting events as an imposed quelling of civil disturbance by the forces of central government, but as an agreed solution by the majority of Ulster leaders, assisted by the prestige and the cannons of the lord deputy. As with the appeal from O’Donnell and O’Neill to Earl Gerald’s arbitration of their disputes in 1491, there is acquiescence to the authority of the Dublin government when tactfully wielded by a Geraldine. The element of tact is demonstrated by Earl Gerald’s decision to leave the already inaugurated Domnall Clárach O’Neill in power, rather than pressing the claims of his nephew Toirdelbach, who was in any case by no means the eldest son of the late Conn Mór. The rise and fall of Henry Óc, coinciding as it did with the rise and fall of the Butler attempt under Sir James Ormond to undermine Geraldine influence generally, demonstrates how far Gaelic Ulster had become a part of the wider political scene in this era, christened by Edmund Curtis as ‘Anglo-Irish Home Rule’. Curtis has been strongly criticized for importing the values of the early twentieth century into a completely different medieval context, but perhaps the criticism was too harsh. As Ellis pointed out, ‘Home Rule’ does not in itself imply separatism.95 There was never any sign that the Geraldines identified themselves with the Gaelic Irish, though in their more extravagant moments they claimed to be Greek rather than English,96 and nor are they found aspiring to an independent kingship of Ireland (apart possibly from the ‘rebellious’ first 94 AU 3, pp, 436–9; AFM 4, pp 1242–7 (AD1498). 95 S.G. Ellis, ‘Nationalist historiography and the English and Gaelic worlds in the late Middle Ages’, IHS, 25:97 (1986), 1–18: 2–3; idem, ‘Historiographical debate: representations of the past in Ireland: whose past and whose present?’, IHS, 27:108 (1991), 289–308: 301. 96 Katharine Simms, ‘The Geraldines and Gaelic culture’ in Peter Crooks and Seán Duffy (eds), The Geraldines and medieval Ireland

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earl of Desmond in the mid-fourteenth century).97 They were loyal servants of the English crown in Ireland as long as they were permitted to run affairs in their own way. The final years of the Great Earl of Kildare’s deputyship until his death in 1513 saw this system of delegation operating virtually unhindered under the end of Henry VII’s reign and the beginning of that of Henry VIII. Ireland experienced many problems at this time, financial, social and political, which were duly reported to the English king and his council, but the geographical extent of Earl Gerald’s control outside the English Pale, and the degree to which his authority was voluntarily acknowledged by major Gaelic Irish chieftains and Anglo-Irish ‘rebels’ (lineages living outside the reach of English common law) had not been seen since the thirteenth century, and was to be strikingly illustrated at the Battle of Knockdoe (1504). During this time the dominant power in Ulster were the O’Donnells, father and son. In 1499 the old Áed Rúad O’Donnell travelled to the Pale to meet Earl Gerald, and was given his young son, Henry Fitzgerald to foster, a very powerful symbol of mutual confidence and friendship. Political fruits of this alliance are seen in a possible quid pro quo whereby the Great Earl entered Connacht in 1499 and subdued the O’Kellys and O’Connors in east Galway and south Roscommon, taking hostages and submission, after which (following the sequence of events given by the Four Masters) O’Donnell launched a separate invasion, exacting tribute and the return of the Cathach, the precious battle-relic, from the new MacDermot (in north Roscommon), brother of the chief who had delivered such a decisive defeat to O’Donnell’s son Conn and the army of Tír Conaill in 1497.98 Another example of complementary invasions occurred in 1500 when O’Donnell entered Tír Eógain with an army, burnt O’Neill’s chief town of Dungannon, destroyed ‘the old castle’ (Castletown, parish of Cappagh, county Tyrone), and demolished the crannóc or fortified artificial island at Loch Láegaire (Lough Mary, Baronscourt, county Tyrone), an O’Neill stronghold in the contested borderland of Cenél Múáin. Thereafter Earl Gerald brought another army into Tír Eógain and joined forces with O’Donnell to besiege the castle of Cenn Aird (Caledon, county Tyrone), expelling its owners, the sons of Seaán Buide O’Neill (‘John the Yellow-haired’, a younger brother of the late Henry son of Eógan O’Neill), and handing the castle over to Earl Gerald’s nephew, Toirdelbach son of Conn Mór O’Neill. This strongly suggests that the pact made the year before between Áed Rúad O’Donnell and Earl Gerald had included an agreement on O’Donnell’s part to abandon his support for Domnall Clárach, the current Great O’Neill, and to favour the advancement of Toirdelbach, the Earl’s nephew. It is at any rate clear that Domnall Clárach saw (Dublin, 2016), pp 264–7, at pp 272–4.

97 See above, pp 115–16.

98 AU 3, pp 442–5;

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Toirdelbach’s promotion as an attack on his position, since six weeks later, he seized Toirdelbach and deprived him of his herds of livestock, giving rise to much internal strife in Tír Eógain.99 As it happened, the young Toirdelbach, ‘son of the Earl’s daughter’, ‘the best son of a lord of the Irish of his time’, was killed in 1501, while supporting one side of a succession dispute among the Mac Mahons of Airgialla.100 Relations continued to be bad between Domnall Clárach, the Great O’Neill of Tír Eógain, and Earl Gerald thereafter, but the sons of Conn Mór, both Earl Gerald’s remaining O’Neill nephew, Conn Bacach (‘Conn the lame’) and his half-brothers, remained allied to the old Áed Rúad O’Donnell,101 and the Great Earl also had allies among one branch of the O’Neills of Clandeboy. In 1503, the earl entered east Ulster with an army, demolished the Clandeboy O’Neills’ castle of Belfast and installed Sandal, a local Anglo-Irishman, as constable in Carrickfergus. Thereafter his Clandeboy ally, Niall son of Conn son of Áed Buide II O’Neill, brought a mixed force of Anglo-Irish and Gaelic troops on an invasion of Tír Eógain, presumably against the now hostile Domnall Clárach. However the earl’s influence in east Ulster suffered a setback the same year when the rival faction among the Clandeboy O’Neills, led by the sons of Brian son of Niall Gallda O’Neill, attacked Carrickfergus and slew many of the garrison.102 The full extent of the Great Earl’s influence over Ulster was to be demonstrated in the following year at the Battle of Knockdoe. He had neutralized the Butler threat to his influence in Ireland by the marriage of his daughter Margaret to the leading Irish Butler, Piers Rúad. However there remained the former allies of Sir James of Ormond, the Burkes of Clanrickard and the O’Briens of Thomond (county Clare).103 Gerald Mór had married his daughter to Ulick Burke, lord of Clanrickard, but he had recently offended Burke by his invasion of Connacht in 1499 and exaction of submission from O’Connor and O’Kelly, eating away at Burke’s own sphere of influence. In 1504, the Burkes attacked the chief Máelechlainn O’Kelly, and destroyed three of his castles, whereupon he appealed for assistance to Gerald Mór. The extensive list of Irish and Anglo-Irish leaders who joined forces with the lord deputy Kildare’s avenging army is the most convincing evidence of all for the extent of his authority, both as head of government and as head of the Geraldine faction. Apart from ‘the Foreigners and Gaidhel of the province of Leinster’ the annals state that the Great Earl was supported by the whole north of Ireland (Leth Chuinn) apart from the disgruntled Domnall Clárach, the Great O’Neill of Tír Eógain. His absence was not as serious as it might have been, because his tánaiste or deputy, Art son of Áed ‘of the Fews’ O’Neill, ruler of south Armagh, came to join FitzGerald’s army, along with the old Áed Rúad O’Donnell and his AFM 4, pp 1250–3 (AD1499). 99 AU 3, pp 448–9; AFM 4, pp 1254–5 (AD1500). 100 AU 3, pp 454–7; AFM 5, pp 1258–61 (AD1501). 101 AFM 5, pp 1268–9 (AD1503). 102 AFM 5, pp 1270–1. 103 Donal O’Carroll, ‘The Battle of Knockdoe, 19th August 1504’, Journal

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son, Áed Dub. The O’Donnells brought with them their extensive alliance of north Connacht chieftains, including Burke of Mayo, O’Conor Roe and the newly subdued MacDermot, chief of north Roscommon. All the border chiefs of south Ulster were also present, MacMahon of Airgialla or Monaghan, O’Hanlon from Airthir or south Armagh, O’Reilly from Cavan and the son of Magennis from south Down. The traditional account in the Book of Howth depicts the earl summoning his noblemen to a council of war before advancing to the battlefield, and shows the Irish chiefs participating fully in this council, and indeed attempting to expel churchmen and lawyers from the assembly, as being insufficiently warlike.104 The battle ended in a crushing victory for the lord deputy whereupon he advanced with O’Donnell to occupy the town of Galway for some time, before returning to Dublin in triumph, taking four of Ulick Burke’s children with him as hostages.105 Bringing an Ulster chief and his army inside an Anglo-Irish town was a striking instance of the degree of trust shared between O’Donnell and the earl, a trust apparently not felt by the inhabitants of Galway themselves, since not long after, in 1518, they passed a bye-law: ‘If any man should bring any Irishman to brage or boste upon the towne, to forfeit 12d. … that neither O’ nor Mac shall strutted ne swaggere thro’ the streets of Gallway’.106 Áed Rúad died the next year at the age of 78. The Annals of Ulster comment: And there came not from Brian Borumha, or from Cathal Red-hand down a king, or lord, that was of better sway and rule and was of more power than that king. And it was he that preserved lordship from the Mountain down against the Connacians for the Conallians and exacted the rent of Inis-Eogain and the military service of Cenel-Moen from the O’Neill Clans. And it was by him was founded the monastery of Friars Minor of Stricter Observance in Tir-Conaill, namely, in Dun-na-Gall. So that it were fitting to name him the Augustus of the whole north-west of Europe.107 The elegy on his death recalled the earlier praise-poem which had spoken of his qualifications for high-kingship: ‘Five provinces bewail him in unison in the kingdom he did not divide: lament not as a king of Ulaidh a king to whom Da Thí’s land [the whole of Ireland] gave allegiance’.108 Áed Rúad O’Donnell was seamlessly succeeded by his son Áed Dub (‘A. the Black-haired’), who had been ruling by his father’s side for some time. He continued both his close military support of the earl of Kildare, accompanying of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 56 (2004), 46–59: 48. 104 Ibid., 54; Bryan, Gerald FitzGerald, pp 242–3. 105  AFM, AU, ALC, Ann. Conn., s.a. AD1504. 106  James Hardiman, History of Galway (Dublin, 1820, repr. Galway, 1975), p. 201. 107 AU 3, pp 472–5 (AD1505). 108 R.A. Breatnach and P.A. Breatnach, ‘Elegy of Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill (d.1505)’, Éigse, 35 (2005), 27–52: 36.

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the lord deputy into Munster against O’Brien in 1510,109 and also his father’s offers of allegiance to the king of Scotland, James IV. He was able to reconcile these apparently contradictory loyalties during his visit to Edinburgh at King James’ invitation in 1513, where he stayed three months and was able to divert the king from an intended invasion of Ireland, just months before the Scots’ illfated attack on the north of England, defeated at the Battle of Flodden.110 O’Donnell owed his position of pre-eminence both to his Geraldine alliance and to ongoing divisions among the O’Neills of Tír Eógain, caused not only by the aftermath of the assassination of Conn Mór and the subsequent usurpation of kingship by Henry Óc, but also by the territorial wealth and power of various descendants of the long-lived Henry son of Eógan O’Neill’s younger brothers, who turned their fathers’ delegated jurisdictions into hereditary lordships centred on their ownership of key castles, such Omagh, held by ‘Clann Art of Omagh’, and the castle of Cennaird or Caledon, held by the descendants of Seaán Buide O’Neill. For most of Henry son of Eógan’s long career, his loyal tánaiste or deputyleader had been the brother next to him in age, Áed ‘of the Fews’ O’Neill (d.1471). Áed had carved out a new lordship for himself by occupying the church lands of the archbishop of Armagh, at first in defiance of the archbishop’s threats and excommunications, but later agreeing to pay the primate a modest rent.111 Áed’s son and heir Art had succeeded to his father’s role as tánaiste or deputy to Domnall Clárach O’Neill, but had taken an independent line by bringing his forces to support Earl Gerald’s army at the Battle of Knockdoe. It proved a wise choice. The sons of Conn Mór O’Neill, after the failure of Toirdelbach, the Great Earl’s nephew, to secure the castle of Cennaird and his subsequent death, seem to have led a somewhat rootless existence mostly in the west of Tír Eógain.112 There they clashed with the sons and grandsons of Clann Airt ‘of Omagh’, and eventually in 1509 their leader, Art Óc son of Conn, was captured by Art ‘of the Castle’, grandson of Art of Omagh, and handed over to O’Donnell. The other sons of Conn Mór appealed to the Great Earl of Kildare at this point. By the time the lord deputy and his army arrived at Dungannon Castle, it was already in the hands of the sons of Conn Mór, so he proceeded on to take and demolish the castle of Omagh, before returning home in triumph. However when the ruling Great O’Neill, Domnall Clárach, died in August of the same year, the earl of Kildare allowed his tánaiste, Art son of Áed ‘of the Fews’, to be inaugurated as the next ‘Great O’Neill’ without interference, although, as the 109 AFM, AU, ALC s.a. AD1510. 110 AFM 5, pp 1322–3 (AD1513); Egan, ‘James IV, the O’Donnells of Tyrconnell and the road to Flodden’, 19; idem, ‘An Irish context to a Scottish disaster’, p. 14. 111 Simms, ‘The archbishops of Armagh and the O’Neills’, 41, 49–50; Tomás Ó Fiaich, ‘The O’Neills of the Fews, Pt 1’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 7 (1973–4), 1–64. 112 AU 3, pp 462–3, 486–91 (AD1503, 1508, 1509).

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Four Masters remarked, ‘seldom, indeed, had the son of a Tanist been Lord of Cenél Eógain before him’.113 (See Fig. 10) The earl’s decision not to interfere in this case could have been taken on various grounds. As with his deliberate ignoring of the missions to the Scottish king by the O’Donnells, father and son, or earlier winking at Desmond’s intrigues with Perkin Warbeck, he was prone to ‘let sleeping dogs lie’, and not waste his limited military resources unless in response to an actual appeal. Art son of Áed ‘of the Fews’ O’Neill had served him well at the Battle of Knockdoe, and it was part of the Great Earl’s policy to reward his friends. Moreover, the leading son of Conn Mór, Art Óc, was not a son of Eleanor Fitzgerald, and the  remaining son of Conn Mór and Eleanor was younger and somewhat handicapped, to judge by his soubriquet of Conn Bacach (‘C. the Lame’). The earl continued to maintain control of affairs in Ulster thereafter, however. When Niall, head of the Clandeboy O’Neills, died in 1512, Kildare brought an army into eastern Ulster, where he had extensive landed interests through his first wife, Alice FitzEustace, broke down the O’Neill castle of Belfast, and the castle of the Hibernicized MacEoin Bisset in the Glens of Antrim, plundered the surrounding district, and took Niall O’Neill’s son as a prisoner. Áed Dub O’Donnell, who had already supported the earl against O’Brien in 1510, brought his forces into Connacht to meet and ally with the earl in 1512. Again the two most powerful leaders in Ireland seem to have decided on an exchange of favours. O’Donnell was at war with MacWilliam Burke of Mayo and O’Conor of Sligo, both of whom had previously been subject to his father, Áed Rúad, while the earl was using his army to subdue MacDermot of north Roscommon. After his pact with the earl in this year, O’Donnell invaded Tír Eógain to make war on Art son of Áed ‘of the Fews’, the Great O’Neill, with such success that he forced him to surrender his claims to tribute from the peninsula of Inis Eógain, the borderland of Cenél Múáin and the lordship of Fir Manach, after which O’Donnell re-fortified the castle of Omagh and garrisoned it with his own men.114 Next year the Great Earl died. The approving obituary accorded to him in the Annals of Ulster gives no ground for accusing him of disloyalty to the cause of the English king and the colonists. They call him: deputy of the king, the unique Foreigner who was the best and was of most power and fame and estimation and did most of seizure on the Gaidhil and built most of castles for Foreigners and broke down most castles of Gaidhil and was of best right and rule and gave most of his own substance to the men of Ireland, died a death of Unction and penance in Kildare … to the grief of very many of the Foreigners and Gaidhil after him.115 113 AFM 5, pp 1300–3, 1326–7 (AD1509, 1514). 114 AU 3, pp 498–501; AFM 5, pp 1413– 17; ALC 2, 212–15 (AD1512). 115 AU 3, pp 506–7 (AD1513).

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His son, Gerald Óc, succeeded seamlessly to his father’s lands and office, and continued his political control of the Gaelic and Anglo-Irish lords beyond the Pale, including the Irish of Ulster. As Mary Ann Lyons commented: The first phase of Gerald [Óc]’s career bore remarkable signs of resemblance to and continuity with that of his father: both remained on amicable terms with the king; both wielded substantial control over the Dublin council; both encountered difficulties arising from internal succession contests in the Ormond lordship; both campaigned to subjugate Gaelic septs and to quell resistance and disturbances in Gaelic lordships.116 In the same year that the Great Earl died, the Great O’Neill, Art, son of Áed ‘of the Fews’, also died. The new earl of Kildare brought the army he controlled as lord deputy up to Tír Eógain to assist the leading son of Conn Mór, Art Óc, to take over the castle of Dungannon, the headquarters of the O’Neill lordship, and to succeed to the title of the Great O’Neill. In so doing, he did not alter the course of the succession, since we are told that Art Óc, who was not one of the earl’s nephews, was supported by the traditional inaugurator, O’Cahan, and by a ‘very great part of Cenél Eógain’.117 The earl’s army merely ensured a smooth transfer of power by helping Art Óc to eject the sons of the previous Great O’Neill from Dungannon. Nevertheless, Art Óc’s accession to power in Tír Eógain stirred up fresh contention in Ulster and problems for the young earl, as the new Great O’Neill strove to take back the concessions his two predecessors had made to O’Donnell. These had abandoned their claim to tribute from the peninsula of Inis Eógain, the contested borderland of Cenél Múáin, and the lordship of Fir Manach, and accorded de facto tolerance of O’Donnell’s influence over the O’Neill of Clandeboy.118 It is probably in relation to this period that the short prose tract now known as ‘The Quartering Rights of the Uí Dhomhnaill’ was composed, which claimed that O’Donnell was entitled to billet his mercenary soldiers on every chief in Ulster except the household (lucht tighe) of the Great O’Neill, that is, the limited area of Tyrone lying between the modern Cookstown and Dungannon.119 In the year after his accession, Art Óc succeeded in crushing the allied forces of the son of Domnall Clárach, the recent Great O’Neill, and the descendants of Art O’Neill of Omagh, who had earlier taken him prisoner in Omagh Castle 116 Lyons, Gearóid Óg, p. 5. 117 AU 3, pp 508–11 (AD1513); AFM 5, pp 1326–7 (AD1514). 118 Above, pp 210, 212. 119 J.G. O’Keeffe, ‘Quartering rights of the Uí Dhomhnaill over Ulster: MS Rawlinson B 514, f. 67b’ in J. Fraser, P. Grosjean and J.G. O’Keeffe (eds), Irish Texts IV (London, 1934), pp 29–30; Éamon Ó Doibhlín, Domhnach Mór: an outline of parish history (Omagh, 1969), maps facing pp 40 & 41 (see O’Neill’s ‘Lotie’ [Lucht Tige or

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in the days before he rose to power. The annals comment ‘he humbled them then, so that lordship of Tir-Eogain remained without dispute with him from that out’.120 Buoyed up by this success, Art Óc then collected a great force to confront O’Donnell, but here found himself outnumbered, and was forced to sue for peace, confirming the hated concessions made by his predecessors in regard to Inis Eógain, Cenél Múáin and Fir Manach, and only gaining the release of his son, whom O’Donnell had been holding hostage for a number of years.121 The treaty had included an acknowledgment of O’Donnell’s role as patron of the O’Neills of Clandeboy, but the following year, 1515, O’Donnell was seriously ill from an accidentally self-inflicted wound during a campaign in north Connacht, and Art Óc took advantage of this incapacity to invade Clandeboy and force a submission to himself as Great O’Neill from the Clandeboy chief, sealed with the acceptance of ceremonial ‘wages’ or tuarastal.122 This placed Gerald Óc, 9th earl of Kildare and lord deputy, in a difficult position. He had deliberately assisted Art Óc to become the Great O’Neill just a year previously, but the O’Donnells had been the most consistent Geraldine supporters in Ulster for two generations. In 1516, matters came to a head. O’Donnell brought his army into Tír Eógain to confront Art Óc and by the advice of their respective territorial councils the two leaders swore to bring their differences to Dublin in a month’s time to be arbitrated by the lord deputy and the king’s council there. The explicit involvement of both the territorial councils of the nobles of Tír Eógain and Tír Conaill, and the king’s council in Dublin in this treaty shows how far Gaelic Ulster was becoming integrated into a political system encompassing all Ireland under Geraldine rule. However, when the month was up, O’Donnell came to meet the earl of Kildare in Dublin, but Art Óc O’Neill did not, nor did he send any representative.123 Unsurprisingly in 1517/18 O’Donnell and the earl of Kildare both brought armies to invade Tír Eógain. O’Donnell burnt the town of Dungannon and the districts to the south of it, and reasserted his overlordship of O’Neill of Clandeboy, while the earl destroyed Dungannon Castle itself ‘at the instance of the sons of the earl’s daughter’,124 that is, Art Óc’s half-brothers, the sons of Conn Mór O’Neill and Eleanor FitzGerald. These were, of course, first cousins to Earl Gerald Óc himself, and one was the future chieftain, Conn Bacach. The advancement of Conn Bacach to the position of Great O’Neill on the death of Art Óc in 1519 further integrated Ulster into the island-wide Geraldine network. On the same 1517/18 expedition the earl had entered eastern Ulster, and reduced Magennis to complete subjection, while he expelled Roland or Raibilín ‘Household’] on Plate XIII). 120  AU 3, pp 514–15 (1514). 121  Ibid. When the descendants of Art of Omagh took Art Óc prisoner in 1509, he was handed over to O’Donnell, and then released in 1511 by his brother-in-law, Magnus the son of O’Donnell, without O’Donnell’s consent, in exchange for leaving his son as a hostage (AU 3, pp 488–91, 494–5). 122 AU 3, pp 516–19 (AD1515). 123 AU 3, pp 520–5 (AD1516). 124 AU 3, pp 526–9;

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Savage from his lands and power. The Great Earl of Kildare had officially appointed Roland seneschal of Ulster in 1482,125 but in a treatise on the state of Ireland in 1515 he was described as ‘one of the English great rebels’.126 The 9th earl removed him on the advice of Prior Magennis of Down Abbey, and appointed the Prior seneschal instead, thus setting a Gaelic Irish aristocrat to rule the remnant of the Anglo-Irish colony in south Down.127 The Kildare rental, commenced by Gerald Óc, the 9th earl (see Plate XII), in 1518, shows the earl had a long-standing relationship with Prior Glaisne Magennis of Down. The manors of Ardglass and Strangford in Ulster, once held by the Dartas, or Dartasso family,128 had descended to the Kildares in 1496 through Gerald Mór’s first marriage to Alice FitzEustace.129 No doubt Prior Magennis was very useful as an administrator of these lands. As early as 1513, on coming into his inheritance, Gerald Óc made a present of 20 marks to Prior Magennis ‘to by hym a horse’. Similar presents of horses, or the price of a horse, were made at that time to MacMurrough, O’Conor, MacGilpatrick, O’More, O’Nolan, O’Byrne, O’Dunne in Leinster, O’Shaughnessy, O’Conor Don, O’Kelly, O’Madden in Connacht, O’Molloy, Mageoghegan, Art Sinnach (the Fox), O’Melaghlin in Meath, O’Farrell in Longford, MacCarthy Reagh, O’Kennedy, O’Carroll, O’Meagher in Munster, and in Ulster to MacMahon and his wife,130 but interestingly no horse is recorded in 1513 or in later years being bestowed on any O’Donnell or O’Neill ruler, probably because acceptance of such a gift would mark a humiliating degree of submission for such great lords.131 Horses, leases of lands and the right to collect tolls and customs were bestowed not only on Prior Magennis, but on other Gaelic Irish leaders favoured by the 9th earl, a testimony both to his generosity and authority over them, while many more owed the earl an annual tribute.132 This extensive power originating beyond the English Pale and beyond the reach of common law was one cause of mistrust between the earl and the Anglo-Irish of the Pale. Another problem was a reawakening of the Fitzgerald–Butler enmity. After the death of the 7th earl of Ormond in England in August 1515, the king favoured the 7th earl’s daughters, Margaret Boleyn (grandmother of Anne Boleyn) and Anne St Leger. He refused to recognize the claim of Kildare’s sonin-law, Piers Ruad Butler, to inherit the title as 8th earl of Ormond, while AFM 5, pp 1340–1 (AD1517). 125 Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 270, no. 4 (Rot. Pat. 22 Edw. IV). 126 State papers, Hen. VIII, pt 3, 1, p. 7. 127 Ann. Conn., pp 634–5 (AD1519). 128 See above, p. 157; Edmund Curtis, ‘Janico Dartas, Richard the Second’s “Gascon Squire”: his career in Ireland, 1394–1426’, JRSAI, 62 (1933), 182–205: 197–8. 129  Bryan, Gerald FitzGerald, p. 213. 130 Mac Niocaill, Crown surveys, pp 319–21. 131 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 101–3. In 1515, the 9th earl bestowed a horse on a minor member of the O’Donnell family, Calbach mac Éicnecháin O’Donnell – Mac Niocaill, Crown surveys, p. 323. Needless to say this taboo on accepting gifts did not apply in England, and Kildare presented horses to the king and the duke of Norfolk, among others. 132 Mac Niocaill, Crown surveys, pp 246, 248, 252, 320, 328.

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allowing him to succeed to the Butlers’ Irish lands. Kildare himself recognized Piers as 8th earl in 1516, but was not considered to have pressed the king sufficiently strongly in Piers’ cause. Moreover a long-standing statute had allowed Earl Gerald as lord deputy to collect two-thirds of the revenues of the Ormond lands, to finance their defence, while the earl of Ormond was an absentee. Now that Piers was acknowledged as the resident owner of the Ormond lands in Ireland, Earl Gerald vainly claimed compensation for the loss of income this involved, and the discontented Piers became a spokesman for the Pale’s grievances. In 1519 Earl Gerald was summoned to England to answer accusations of having abused the power of his office. ‘So numerous were the complaints’, say the Annals of Connacht, ‘that men thought he would never come back’.133 It was unfortunate that this break in continuity occurred in the same year as the accession of Conn Bacach to power as the Great O’Neill. Half Geraldine by birth, Conn Bacach was to prove wholly Geraldine in his allegiance.

T H E FA L L O F T H E H O U S E O F K I L D A R E

Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, the future duke of Norfolk, was then appointed lieutenant of Ireland, and came over in person to take up his office in May 1520, almost immediately finding himself at war with O’Neill in the north and O’More in the midlands. As had happened with Gerald Mór the 8th earl of Kildare in 1495,134 Gerald Óc was arrested and tried before Cardinal Wolsey in July 1520, accused of having written letters to his Irish allies, in this case O’Carroll and Conn Bacach, the new Great O’Neill, urging them to mount attacks on landowners who were not Geraldine supporters, specifically timed to take place as soon as the English lieutenant arrived. Conn Bacach immediately, we are told, contacted Áed Dub O’Donnell to tell him of the plan, confident of cooperation from the O’Donnells, whose rise to power over two generations had owed so much to their link with the Geraldines. However Áed Dub O’Donnell was not only older than Conn, he had twice visited the English court, and been flattered and feted there, on his way to and from a pilgrimage to Rome in 1510, and had later visited the Scottish court at the invitation of King James in 1513.135 He had a better idea of the forces that could be brought to bear to crush the Geraldines, and moreover, was aware that the balance of power within Ulster was about to tip against him, now that he could no longer count on an alliance with Earl Gerald Óc against a recalcitrant or hostile O’Neill, resenting the earl’s favouritism towards his O’Neill nephews. Taking the opposing side, he advanced to meet Surrey, who wrote happily to King Henry VIII: 133 Ann. Conn., pp 634–5 (AD1519); Lyons, Gearóid Óg, pp 29–32. 135 AU 3, pp 496–7, 506–7 (AD1510, 1513).

134 Above, pp 204–5.

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I founde ODowniyl here; whom I fynde a right wise man, and as well determyned to doo to Your Grace all thinges, that may be to your contentacion and pleasure, as I can wyssh him to bee. He hath confessed to me that, a litill before my comyng, ONele sent to him, desiring him, assone as I were landed, to moeve warr against me; saying that, for his part, he wold soo doo, for he was desirid by the Erl of Kildare soo to doo. To whom ODownyl answerid, that he was your true subgiet, and who soo ever Your Grace appoyntid to have the rule here, he wold truely serve and defend him. He hath promysid me to envade ONele on his side, when I shall envade him on my syde. And in comunyng with him of Youre Graces affaires here, he said, “If ever the Kyng send the Erl of Kildare hether in auctoritie agayne, let the king make him an assuraunce, by indenture of this land, to him and to his heires for ever.”136 The incriminatory letters from the earl were never produced, however, and Gerald Óc was soon released for lack of evidence.137 Surrey had been sent with extensive plans for a reform of the way Ireland was being run, but already by July 1520 he wrote ‘the said Irishmen wol not bee brought to noo good order, onles it bee by compulsyon, which woll not bee doon without a great puissaunce of men, and great costis of money, and long contynuaunce of tyme’.138 As he began to realize the practical value of including Earl Gerald in the future government of Ireland, Surrey’s view of O’Donnell became less favourable, and his relations with Conn Bacach O’Neill improved. Conn Bacach promised to assist the king to recover his earldom of Ulster, which was in effect a promise to move against his opponent, Áed son of Niall O’Neill of Clandeboy, a brother-in-law and ally of O’Donnell. In return the king sent Conn a collar of gold and authorized Surrey to dub him a knight.139 In September 1520, Surrey was still citing the ruler of Tír Conaill as a standard of loyalty, calling Cormac Óc MacCarthy ‘the man of all the Irishmen of the land save ODownyl, that I thynk wold moost gladly fall to English order’.140 A year later, however, while Cardinal Wolsey’s informant in Ireland, John Stiles, was still enthusiastic about Áed Dub O’Donnell and his grandiose promises of military support for the government,141 Surrey called O’Donnell a liar, and accused him of frustrating the lieutenant’s attempts to forge an alliance with Conn Bacach O’Neill:

136 State papers, Hen. VIII, pt 3, 1, p. 37. The last remark was a satirical warning to the king that reinstating the earl would mean renouncing royal control over all Ireland (Laurence McCorristine, The revolt of Silken Thomas: a challenge to Henry VIII (Dublin, 1987), p. 42). 137 Lyons, Gearóid Óg, p. 34. 138 State papers, Hen. VIII, pt 3, 1, p. 37. 139 Ibid., pp 56, 71. 140 Ibid., p. 47. 141 Ibid., p. 81.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages the goode service, that ODonayll, and Hew McNele [O’Donnell’s brotherin-law, O’Neill of Clandeboy], hath done Your Grace, is not only to forbere to come to me, when I had nede off them, but also to kepe ONele fro commyng to me, with so grete poure, that, iff he had come, all such Irishmen, as be at war with me, wold have be so affrayed theroff, that they wold have put their ostages in to my handes, to have kept contynewell peas unto me … Your Grace may be assewred, what so ever he [O’Donnell] sayth, no men in Erlond wolbe more sory to se Your Grace recover your rightfull enheritaunce of thErldome off Ulcester, then he, and Hew McNele [O’Neill of Clandeboy]; for they, theyr servantes, and subjectes, have more grownde off Your Graces seid enheritaunce, then 6 the gretest men of lond in Inglond have, within your Realme … And wher he writeth to Your Grace, he woll no peas have with no Irishman, that is rebell to Your Grace, and that woll not answer your courtes, and obey your lawes (wich he, nor his subjectes, woll not do), he observith ill his seid promes, for he is at peas with all such, as be at war with me, and makith war with such, as wold help me agaynst myn enemys.142

Despite this protest, Wolsey and his advisers continued to favour O’Donnell and the Butlers, although, interestingly, as Wolsey’s influence began to fade in July 1528, we gather he became less convinced by O’Donnell’s suave eloquence: Item, ther bee alsoo pleasaunte letters devised to ODonell, not oonly to contynue hym in good devocion to the king, but alsoo the rather thereby to cause hym to bee assistente to the said James Butler, or suche other as shalbe deputed by the king to defende the said lande; and the said letters bee the more dulce, because his letters of aunswere to the king bee verie humble and pleasaunte, and of right good contynue and purpoorte, as maye appere to His Highnes, whenne it shall bee his pleasure to here the same red.143 The implication is that O’Donnell’s letters were more valuable for the soothing effect they might exercise on the irascible Henry VIII than for any tangible result from his promises of service. In September 1521, Surrey, whose health was undermined, left Ireland, appointing Piers Ruad Butler at the king’s insistence to act for him, and in March 1522 Piers Ruad took over sole charge as lord deputy. However he too was under constant attack from Geraldine supporters in Ireland and also requested that Gerald Óc be sent back from England.144 Conn Bacach O’Neill launched repeated attacks against O’Donnell in 1522. His army of Ulster chiefs was reinforced, significantly, by ‘the earl of Kildare’s 142 Ibid., p. 83. 143 Ibid., pp 137–8. 144 Lyons, Gearóid Óg, pp 33–7.

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gallowglasses’,145 together with a contingent of Scots, and some Anglo-Irish of Meath. After a series of more-or-less successful raids, Conn also instigated a general uprising of the Connacht leaders against O’Donnell’s dominance. MacWilliam Burke of Clanrickard and MacWilliam Burke of Mayo, MacDermot, O’Conor Don, O’Kelly, some O’Briens and the O’Carrolls of Ely, ‘from the design and proceedings of O’Neill’, planned to invade Tír Conaill from the south and meet there with O’Neill’s incursion from the east. However Áed Dub O’Donnell and his son Magnus heavily defeated Conn’s army at the Battle of Knockavoe, near the modern Strabane, after which O’Neill’s Connacht allies, who had got no further than Sligo, fled without striking another blow.146 In January 1523, Kildare was allowed back, and immediately started acting as head of the country. In a letter to King Henry, Earl Gerald blithely described how at the beginning of May he had led an army into eastern Ulster on a punitive raid against O’Donnell’s ally, O’Neill of Clandeboy and his Scottish allies, destroyed Clandeboy’s castle of Belfast and some others belonging to the MacDonalds of the Glens, took the mayor of Carrickfergus and his brothers prisoner, and sent them to England on charges of trading with the Bretons and Scots, all without permission of Piers Ruad Butler, who was still lord deputy. Butler retaliated by destroying some of Earl Gerald’s border castles in the midlands and seizing his stud of 500 horses. Earl Gerald complained that he had no remedy against the Butlers, because to avoid the king’s displeasure ‘I forbere to make any bondes with Irishmen against him, that hath your auctorite’.147 While Earl Gerald campaigned against O’Neill of Clandeboy in east Ulster, the Great O’Neill, Conn Bacach, was once more at war with O’Donnell in the west. Between Spring and Harvest Áed Dub O’Donnell conducted two destructive expeditions into Tír Eógain, while his son and heir, Magnus O’Donnell, travelled to Scotland, to renew the family’s links with this external power. Conn Bacach achieved a truce with O’Donnell by harvest-time, and it was presumably after this that, according to the annals: A very great army was led by Garrett, earl of Kildare, the English of Meath, and O’Neill (Con, the son of Con, son of Henry, son of Owen), against O’Conor Faly, Connell O’More, and the Irish of Leinster in general. All these Irish abided by the decision and arbitration of O’Neill between them and the Earl, and O’Neill, after having made peace between them, delivered the pledges and hostages of the Irish into the keeping of the Earl, in security for the performance of every demand he made of them; and so they separated from each other in peace.148 145  Ann. Conn., pp 640–3 (AD1522). 146  AU 3, pp 538–43 (AD1522); Raphael McGranaghan, ‘The Battle of Knockavoe’ in Katharine Simms (ed.), Gaelic Ireland (c.600– 1700): studies for the Irish Chiefs’ Prize (Dublin, 2013), pp 111–22. 147 State papers, Hen. VIII, pt 3, 1, pp 99–102. 148 AFM 5, pp 1366–7 (AD1523).

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O’Conor Faly and Conall O’More were the chief enemies against whom Surrey had fought in 1520–1, and the intimidatory presence of O’Neill and his forces was precisely the weapon the Lieutenant had hoped to use against them in 1521, if he had not been frustrated by the war waged against Conn Bacach by O’Donnell and his brother-in-law, Áed O’Neill of Clandeboy.149 The close correspondence between what was planned then and what was carried out by Kildare in 1523 suggests this had been a Geraldine policy, probably proposed to Surrey by Conn Bacach O’Neill, who was evidently in correspondence with the earl of Kildare, employed the Kildare galloglasses during Gerald Óc’s absence in England, and was not only Gerald Óc’s cousin through his mother Eleanor FitzGerald, but became his son-in-law, through his marriage to the earl’s daughter, Alice FitzGerald.150 These victorious campaigns could be interpreted as a usurpation of Piers Ruad Butler’s authority as lord deputy, and the Butler–FitzGerald feud increased in violence. In August 1524, once Kildare, Piers Butler and the AngloIrish marcher lords had all been bound over to keep the peace in detailed indentures, Earl Gerald was again officially appointed lord deputy. Conn Bacach O’Neill attended the ceremony and took part in the triumphal procession through the streets of Dublin.151 This marked the culmination of the growing integration of Gaelic Ulster into an Irish administration under Geraldine control, which is first seen when O’Donnell voluntarily came to Dublin to seal an alliance with the ‘Great Earl’ of Desmond in 1464.152 Despite the elaborate negotiations and indentures, the feud between the Butlers and FitzGeralds continued, and with it the war between O’Donnell and O’Neill. In the summer of 1524 O’Donnell once more launched a destructive raid into Tír Eógain, which provoked a retaliatory expedition by the earl of Kildare ‘to relieve his kinsman, O’Neill, i.e., Con, the son of Con, and to wreak his vengeance upon O’Donnell’. The annals interestingly comment that the old Áed O’Donnell was intimidated by the cannons the lord deputy had brought with him, but his more forward-looking son Magnus had earlier fortified their position in Port na Trí Namad with trenches, and imported a large army of Scots, including the MacDonalds under Alexander son of John Cathánach, lord of Dunivaig and the Glens of Antrim (d.1538), and now attacked despite his father’s advice. This show of strength induced O’Neill to offer a peace conference mediated, as so often before, by Kildare. O’Donnell and Kildare formed a bond of gossipred, and O’Neill and the lord deputy returned to Tír Eógain, which was being ravaged in the east by O’Donnell’s ally, Áed O’Neill of Clandeboy. Áed foolishly stood his ground against the lord deputy’s army and was killed.153 149 Above, p. 218. 150 Gilbert, History of the viceroys, p. 424. p. 39. 152 Above, p. 187. 153 AFM 5, pp 1368–73 (AD1524).

151 Lyons, Gearóid Óg,

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Next year both O’Neill and O’Donnell were summoned by Kildare to attend a Great Council in Dublin, where it was hoped to arrange a more lasting peace between them. Both attended, but, say the annalists: ‘after their labouring and much parley made by their friends of the Foreigners and Gaidhil against each other and for themselves, it resulted not in peace being made between them, but in going to their houses’.154 This reference to Anglo-Irish ‘friends’ on both sides of the dispute suggests the Butler–Geraldine feud was interfering with the peace process in Ulster, another sign of the close integration of Gaelic and Anglo-Irish politics at this time. O’Donnell then renewed his raids on Tír Eógain, but Conn Bacach O’Neill refrained from retaliating, preferring to retain Kildare’s favour and by August another peace was arbitrated between them by Kildare and Magnus O’Donnell. Magnus (or Manus) O’Donnell was beginning to distance himself from his father’s policies. He was a brother-in-law of Conn Bacach, and also connected to the Geraldines, through his marriage to Joan, daughter of Conn Mór O’Neill.155 In 1526, it was Magnus O’Donnell who accompanied Conn Bacach to submit their disputes to the arbitration of the earl of Kildare, though once again without achieving peace. Magnus then returned to continue fortifying the border of Tír Conaill with a castle at Lifford, while his father launched yet another expedition to quell resistance to his overlordship in north Connacht. The earl of Kildare made a separate expedition into Connacht which had the effect of limiting O’Donnell’s power by handing over the castles he captured into the keeping of O’Conor Roe.156 The following year Magnus O’Donnell completed his border castle in what was considered record time, and then mediated a common-sense settlement between his father Áed Dub O’Donnell and Conn Bacach O’Neill by dividing the disputed territories in west Tír Eógain and Fir Manach between them,157 bringing a noticeable pause in their hostilities. Although I have not seen emphasis placed on this episode elsewhere, it seems to me a more striking example of the dawn of a modern mentality in both Magnus O’Donnell and Conn Bacach O’Neill than any discussion of their clothes or literary tastes,158 154 AU 3, pp 556–7 (AD1525). John O’Donovan’s translation of the parallel passage in AFM 5, pp 1378–9 reads: ‘after they themselves, and their English and Irish friends, had debated and argued upon every covenant that had ever been entered into between them till that time, it was still found impossible for the Lord Justice and all the other chieftains to reconcile them to each other; so that they returned to their homes at strife, and the war between them was renewed.’ 155 Ann. Conn., pp 686–7; AFM 5, pp 1422–3 (AD1535). The AFM entry implies Joan was born c.1493, the year in which Conn Mór was assassinated. His wife Eleanor Fitzgerald lived on to 1497, so is the presumed mother of Joan. 156 Ann. Conn., pp 658–63 (AD1526). 157  AU 3, pp 564–5 (AD1527). 158  See Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Manus the Magnificent: O’Donnell as Renaissance prince’ in Art Cosgrove and Donal McCartney (eds), Studies in Irish history (Dublin, 1979), pp 15–36; Darren Mac Eiteagáin, ‘The Renaissance

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since it involved a pragmatic territorial division which ignored the historic population boundaries of Cenél Múáin and Fir Manach, over which battle had raged for so many centuries. However just as Ulster was approaching stability, external factors heralded the beginning of the end to the long-lived Geraldine supremacy over Ireland as a whole. As the influence of Ann Boleyn grew in court, the complaints of her kinsfolk in Ireland, the Butlers, were taken more seriously. In December 1526, Kildare left Ireland to answer the accusations of Piers Ruad Butler and his supporters before the king’s council in England. Piers soon followed after to put his case. By 1528, Kildare had been arrested, and Piers Ruad Butler was created earl of Ossory. The Irish of the midlands were raiding the Pale, quite probably on Kildare’s orders, and the chancellor and chief justice of Ireland wrote to Wolsey: this poor londe hathe taken great lostes and damagies this winter, aswell this partie of thEnglisshrie, and marches of the same, by reason of the absence of thErll of Kildair, as the counties of Kilkenny and Tipperary by great trobles emong them selffes, that wold have been moche easid, if the Lord of Ormonde had been at home. Thabsence of thise bothe Lordes hathe greatlie enhaunsed and couraiged our Soveraine Lordes Hirissh and Englisshe rebelles; wherby the londe is always in daunger, and wolde be ferr more, werr nat the feree of their retourn.159 The sentiments they expressed were similar to those of Archbishop John Swayne, who had remarked in the fifteenth century that either John Talbot or James Butler, the ‘White Earl’ of Ormond, could rule Ireland better than anyone else if they were not opposed to each other.160 In May the deputy, Baron Delvin, was captured by O’Conor Faly, Kildare’s son-in-law, and the Irish Council appointed Kildare’s brother Lord Thomas FitzGerald as interim governor. An interesting letter of advice was sent to Wolsey in July by the erstwhile earl of Surrey, now duke of Norfolk, recommending him to consult Thomas Bath, a merchant of Drogheda: ‘one that doth more love the welth [i.e., well-being] of that londe, than any of the parties of the Garentyns, or Butlers, and hath done more to cause Onele conteyne fro war, then any man of that londe, to his right gret charges’.161 He suggested either returning Kildare to power, or confirming his brother Lord Thomas FitzGerald in authority, strongly advising against appointing either Piers Ruad or his son Lord James Butler, because their territories were too far removed from the Pale for its effective defence, and pointing out that keeping the Irish quiet with bribes of and the late medieval lordship of Tír Chonaill’ in Donegal Hist. & Soc., pp 203–28. 159 State papers, Hen. VIII, pt 3, 1, p. 126. See Colm Lennon, Sixteenth-century Ireland: the incomplete conquest (Dublin, 1994), pp 97–101. 160  Above, p. 166. 161  State papers,

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black-rent was much cheaper than mounting expeditions to quell them when they rose out every time the payments were stopped. However, Piers Ruad’s agent Robert Cowley also wrote to Wolsey, rubbishing Thomas Bath and his advice: One Bath, of Irland, hath made a boke to present to your Grace, feynyng it to bee for the reformacion of Irland. But the effect is, but to dryve the Kynge to the extremytie to sende home my Lord of Kildare with auctoritie, to accomplish his inordinat aifeccion to my Lord of Kildare. He hath noo more experience of the land, then I have in Ytally.162 In August 1528, the old Piers Ruad Butler, now earl of Ossory, was made lord deputy. One immediate effect was to bring Áed Dub O’Donnell back into favour. The lord deputy wrote to King Henry: Item, it myght pleas the Kynges Grace to wryt unto ODonyll, with gode comfortable persuasionis, that he endever hym to make war upon ONele, in case ONele attempt any hurte to the Kynges subgietes. He alleged that Alice FitzGerald, Kildare’s daughter who eventually became O’Neill’s wife,163 who had been with her father in England and was now returned, had brought secret instructions with her to incite the Irish to war, and that the earl’s brothers had engaged in ‘synestre seducious practisis with ONele’.164 It became obvious that the earl of Ossory could not maintain order in face of Geraldine hostility. In 1530, Sir William Skeffington, master of the king’s ordnance, was sent over from England as lord deputy, accompanied by the earl of Kildare, now pledged to cooperate fully with the English government’s reform programme. O’Reilly, who came to meet them voluntarily, was arrested that year.165 In May 1531, Áed Dub O’Donnell through his emissaries submitted to the deputy and Council in Dublin pledging allegiance on behalf of himself, Maguire, O’Reilly and MacQuillin, whom he claimed as his adherents. Representations were made at the time (perhaps by Geraldines on the Council) suggesting that O’Donnell had more to answer for than Conn Bacach O’Neill, but the emissaries brushed this aside.166 Later that year, at the request of O’Donnell, the head of Clann Airt O’Neill of Omagh and O’Neill of Clandeboy, Skeffington led a host including both the Hen. VIII, pt 3, 1, p. 135. 162 Ibid., p. 142. 163 See Gilbert, History of the viceroys, p. 424. This marriage may not have taken place before 1530, the date of the death of Sorcha daughter of Áed Óc O’Neill of Clandeboy, wife of Conn Bacach (ALC 2, pp 270–3). 164 State papers, Hen. VIII, pt 3, 1, pp 137, 146–7. 165 ALC 2, pp 274–5; AFM 5, pp 1400–1 (AD1530). 166 State papers, Hen. VIII, pt 3, 1, pp 151–3.

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earl of Kildare and the earl of Ormond167 to attack Conn Bacach O’Neill. They devastated Monaghan and destroyed the castle of Cennaird (Caledon, county Tyrone) but, say the annals: O’Neill was, with a host hard to count, in front of them, and they attempted not to go beyond that into Tir-Eogain, and those hosts turned, side for side, to their houses with victory of overthrow, without O’Neill having peace or truce with them.168 Subsequently, judging by the order of events in the Annals of Ulster, O’Donnell and Maguire attacked Áed Dub’s own son Magnus, who was based at the time in Castlefinn. Despite the support of the O’Gallagher family, Magnus suffered a defeat at this time. His lands were ravaged, but there is no indication that O’Donnell succeeded in taking a castle from his son.169 In 1532, O’Donnell came in person accompanied by Maguire to meet Sir William Skeffington at Drogheda. Thereafter Skeffington launched another massive raid into Tír Eógain against Conn Bacach and was joined by every Ulster chief over whom O’Donnell had influence: Maguire and O’Reilly were now joined by MacMahon and Magennis, the descendants of Art O’Neill of Omagh, the descendants of Áed O’Neill of the Fews (from south Armagh) and the O’Neill of Clandeboy. As the annals say: ‘the Gaidhil of all the Half of Conn, except a few, turned on O’Neill about that time’.170 Both the town and castle of Dungannon were destroyed and enormous numbers of cattle captured. Meanwhile O’Donnell himself, with MacDonald of the Glens, was on an expedition into north Connacht to assert his sovereignty there, something Kildare had earlier tried to limit in extent.171 It seems clear that the old Áed Dub O’Donnell saw his opportunity in the change of régime in Dublin to reassert the kind of dominance over the province of Ulster exercised by his father Áed Ruad and himself in the opening years of the century. At that time successive Great O’Neills had been at odds with Earls Gerald Mór and Gerald Óc, resenting the favour shown to the sons of Eleanor FitzGerald and Conn Mór O’Neill, and it was left to O’Donnell to become the Geraldines’ chief ally in Ulster. This had all changed with the inauguration of Conn Bacach, Eleanor’s son, as the Great O’Neill, and O’Donnell saw his only hope of recovering power to lie in undermining Geraldine influence. Áed’s son Magnus O’Donnell, with a more tenuous link to the Geraldine network as brother-in-law of Conn Bacach, saw things differently. 167 State papers, Hen. VIII, pt 3, 1, p. 156. 168 AU 3, pp 578–9 (AD1531). The involvement of the Butlers is shown by the entry in Ann. Conn., pp 676–7: ‘Brian, son of Lochlainn Mac Suibne, constable of the earl of Ormond’s gallowglasses, was killed in a fight on this campaign’. 169 AU 3, pp 578–81 (AD1531). 170 AU 3, pp 584–7 (AD1532). 171 Above, p. 221.

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Plate I Aerial view of Navan Ring (Emain Macha) by kind permission of HERoNI, © Crown DfC Historic Environment Division.

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Plate II Tara Hill, showing Mound of the Hostages (Dumha na nGíall), to the right of the central figure-of-eight formed by the earthworks Forradh and Teach Cormaic, within the extended enclosure of Rath-na-Ríogh. Aerial view © National Monuments Service, Department of Culture, Heritage, and the Gaeltacht.

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Plate III Map of northern kingdoms in the mid-twelfth century as approximately reflected in modern diocesan boundaries, altered to include Co. Louth in the diocese of Clogher (Airgialla) as in later twelfth century. Broken black lines indicate modern county boundaries. Map drawn by Matthew Stout.

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Plate IV Aerial view of Tullyhogue Fort, courtesy of the Centre for Archaeological Fieldwork, QUB, and Irish Sights. In the background to the north are the Sperrin Mountains and Slieve Gallion, the traditional boundary between the regions of ‘Tír Eógain North of the Mountain’ and ‘Tír Eógain South of the Mountain’.

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Plate V Aerial view of Ailech (Greenan Fort, Inishowen, county Donegal) © National Monuments Service, Department of Culture, Heritage, and the Gaeltacht.

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Plate VI The shrine of St Patrick’s Bell. An inscription along the edge of the back asks prayers for the donor, King Domnall MacLaughlin, for Domnall the coarb of Patrick, for Cathalán Ó Máelchallann (Mulholland), the keeper of the bell, and for Cúdúilig Ó hInmainéin and his sons, the craftsmen who made the shrine. Image reproduced with kind permission of the National Museum of Ireland.

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Plate VII Map of the north of Ireland in 1333. Note the contradictory claims to lordship over Maguire as given in the annalistic obit of Áed Ó Domnaill, and in the Inquisitions Post Mortem on the property of Earl William de Burgh. The same overlap applies to the peninsula of Inishowen Map drawn by Matthew Stout.

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Plate VIII Meeting between Art MacMurrough and the earl of Nottingham AD1399, from Jean Creton’s Chronicle © British Library Board, Harley MS 1319, fo. 9.

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Plate IX Map of the north of Ireland at the time of submissions to Richard II, AD1395. Broken red lines mark the boundaries of modern dioceses. Map drawn by Matthew Stout.

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Plate X Map of the north of Ireland, c.1449. Map drawn by Matthew Stout.

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Plate XI Map of the north of Ireland in the 1460s. Map drawn by Matthew Stout.

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Plate XII Portrait of Gerald FitzGerald, 9th earl of Kildare (in private ownership).

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Plate XIII The inauguration of O’Neill on the mound at Tullyhogue. From Map of the East part of Ulster, c.1595 © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (Cat. no. L9622).

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Plate XIV Diagram of the legendary banqueting-hall at Tara as depicted in the twelfthcentury Book of Leinster (LL). Drawing by George Petrie for ‘The history and antiquities of Tara Hill’, RIA Transactions, 18 (1839), plate 8.

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Plate XV Diagram of the legendary banqueting-hall at Tara as depicted in the late fourteenth century Yellow Book of Lecan (YBL). Drawing by George Petrie for ‘The history and antiquities of Tara Hill’, RIA Transactions, 18 (1839), plate 9.

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Plate XVI Lucas de Heere ‘Irlandois et Irlandoise comme ils alloyent accoustres etans au seruice de feu Roy Henry’. Ghent University Library, BHSL.HS.2466.

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At first it seemed as if Magnus’ calculations were correct. Kildare had acquired new allies at court through his marriage to the sister of Lord Leonard Grey, and there were growing financial disagreements between Sir Thomas Boleyn (now earl of Wiltshire) and the Irish Butlers.172 In July 1532, Gerald Óc was once again appointed lord deputy, and according to the annals, Sir William Skeffington was sent back to London ‘under great reproach and contumely’.173 Almost immediately, however, Kildare was again in conflict with the Butlers over his armed attempt to support the succession of his son-in-law, Ferganainm O’Carroll, as chief of Ely O’Carroll, which lay on the borders of the Butler lordship and was traditionally within their sphere of influence. Worse still, Earl Gerald was severely wounded in December 1532 while besieging the castle of Birr (held by a rival O’Carroll, a tenant of Piers Ruad Butler), and he suffered continual ill-health thereafter. Kildare was to plead ill-health as the reason for declining an initial summons to the English court to face the accusations of Piers Ruad Butler, earl of Ossory, and other opponents in September 1533. He transferred the guns he commanded as lord deputy to his own castles, in particular Maynooth. At last, when assured he could leave the government of Ireland in the hands of his own son, Thomas FitzGerald (‘Silken Thomas’), Gerald travelled to England in February 1534. His accusers prevailed. In May the earl’s liberty jurisdiction of Kildare was abolished; on 11 June his son Thomas resigned his deputyship in protest and on 19 June Kildare was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower, after which ‘Silken Thomas’ led a full-scale revolt against Henry’s authority. Earlier Anglo-Irish viceroys, when in disagreement with the English government, had often resorted to encouraging their Irish allies to attack both political opponents in the Pale, and the English governors sent out to replace them. However now the revolt was not only openly led by Thomas Fitzgerald, who became 10th earl of Kildare on his father’s death that September, but Fitzgerald had appealed for help to the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, on the grounds of Henry’s divorce and ‘heretical’ claim to headship of the English church. In September 1534, Sir William Skeffington was sent back to Ireland as governor with a substantial army.174 As a logical continuation of the emerging pattern in Ulster affairs, Áed Dub O’Donnell was promoted to membership of the king’s council in Ireland, and his Ulster allies also proffered their assistance to the new deputy, while Magnus O’Donnell sided with Conn Bacach and ‘Silken Thomas’.175 In 1535, Fitzgerald was defeated and arrested, and in 1537 he and his five uncles were executed for high treason. The end of the Geraldine hegemony also marked the beginning of the end of all hope of integrating Gaelic Ulster into an all-Ireland polity comprising both Gaelic and Anglo-Irish communities. 172 State papers, Hen. VIII, pt 3, 1, p. 154. 173 AU 3, pp 586–9 (AD1532). 174 Lennon, Sixteenth-century Ireland, pp 103–9. 175  State papers, Hen. VIII, pt 3, 1, pp 247–8.

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There was not an immediate break. Under the policy of ‘surrender and regrant’, Conn Bacach O’Neill was created earl of Tyrone in 1542. Magnus O’Donnell, chief of Tír Conaill after his father’s death in 1537, although he failed to secure the title earl of Sligo, was offered the monastic lands of Tír Conaill for a low rent, once he had acknowledged Henry VIII as head of the church.176 Both Lord Leonard Grey, who was uncle to the remaining Geraldine heir, and Sir Anthony St Leger, who was related to the Butlers, each, as chief governor, tried to fill the power vacuum left after the removal of Kildare by imitating his methods, building up a faction of adherents within Ireland among both Gaelic and Anglo-Irish leaders.177 However they lacked Kildare’s territorial power and military following, while they suffered like him from constant political attacks at the English court, ending, in the case of Lord Leonard Grey, with his execution. As time went on, in the words of Ciarán Brady: ‘The reforming chief governor who had once been given responsibility for the creation of a new political community within the island was now displaced in fact if not in person by a far more inferior figure maintaining a holding operation in Ireland at the will of his superiors in London’.178 The gap between what a chief governor on the ground perceived as priorities for bringing Ireland into one community, and the reforming ideas concocted in London, is vividly illustrated by the fate of the ‘Ordinances for the Government of Ireland’ sent to Sir William Skeffington in 1534. John Alen complained to the King’s Secretary, Master Thomas Cromwell: all the printed bookes, wich wer made ther by the King and his Counsaile, moche beneficiall for thorder of this land, and gret paynes your Mastership ded take in the divising and debating of them, he [Skeffington] kepeth secrete, saing thei be lost. May it plese you to commaunde the printer to printe freshe 2 or 300 of them, and to sende them to Mr Brabazon and me; and, God willing, thei shalbe executed, as tyme shall require.179 As well as micro-managing the deputy’s imposition of coyne and livery for his soldiers, and banning the use of this exaction by private landlords within the Pale, these Ordinances forbade Anglo-Irish gentry to wear moustaches or Irish hooded cloaks, ride horses without saddles, entertain bardic poets, shanachies or clowns, purchase Spanish wine or recognize the ‘usurped jurisdiction’ of the Pope.180 176 State papers, Hen. VIII, pt 3, 2, pp 318, 333–4. See Brian Ó Cuív, ‘A sixteenth-century political poem’, Éigse, 15:4 (1974), 261–76: 264–5; Katharine Simms, ‘O’Friel’s ghost’ in John Carey, Kevin Murray and Caitriona O Dochartaigh (eds), Sacred histories: a festschrift for Maire Herbert (Dublin, 2015), pp 401–8. 177 Ciarán Brady, The chief governors: the rise and fall of reform government in Tudor Ireland, 1536–1588 (Cambridge, 1994), pp 13–44. 178 Ibid., p. 60. 179 State papers, Hen. VIII, pt 3, 1, p. 231. 180 See ibid., pp 207–16 for

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The imposition of an unwanted religious reformation on both the Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Irish population was ironically to weld these two communities together in opposition to the crown by the seventeenth century.181 However by then a fresh division had been imported into the island by the policy of confiscation and plantation, which introduced substantial numbers of New English settlers into Ireland, above all in Ulster, where the New English were augmented by thousands of Scots. If one asks why the province of Ulster was singled out for the most comprehensive confiscation and colonization project of anywhere in Ireland, the answer is clearly that it was seen as posing the greatest threat to English control of the island, most recently demonstrated in the Nine Years War, when the Great O’Neill and the O’Donnell for once combined their considerable military might in an attempt to unseat the English government with the assistance of hoped-for armies from Spain.182 Perhaps because of the geographical defensibility of the northern province, it had always provided stronger resistance to invaders than the rest of Ireland, from the Viking period, when the Uí Néill kings eliminated the newcomers’ settlements along the coasts of Ulster, to the arrival of Henry II, when the Northern Uí Néill remained aloof while others submitted, to the high Middle Ages when west and mid-Ulster, and north-west Connacht, together formed the ‘Great Irishry’, the largest contiguous group of territories under the rule of Irish chieftains and Irish law. A number of factors ensured the continued existence of the ‘Great Irishry’ into the early modern period. The mid-thirteenth-century revolts led by Brian O’Neill and Domnall Óc O’Donnell occurred while the earldom of Ulster was in abeyance, administered by royal officials. By the time the de Burgh earls attempted to complete the conquest of the province, the population expansion that had affected Europe in the twelfth to early thirteenth centuries had already peaked, and the supply of land-hungry colonists from England, Wales or France had dwindled. Richard de Burgh, the ‘Red Earl’, took steps to establish an urban settlement in the monastic site of Derry, and another along the river Roe, while there is a more doubtful hint that the FitzGerald lords of Sligo tried to settle the port of Donegal,183 but none of these flourished. The authority of the de Burgh earl over west Ulster was an overlordship based on tribute, military service and the often-asserted claim to determine succession to the Irish chieftainships. None of these rights could be maintained by an absentee lord, as was demonstrated after the murder in 1333 of William de Burgh, the last earl of Ulster to be resident in Ireland. the text of the Ordinances. 181 See Patrick J. Corish, ‘The origins of Catholic nationalism’ in Patrick J. Corish (ed.), A history of Irish Catholicism, 3, fasc. 8 (Dublin and Sydney, 1968). 182 See NHI 3, pp 94–106 (Chapters by G.A. Hayes-McCoy, R.A. Butlin and Aidan Clarke). 183 Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 124–5 (AD1247).

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The Ulster chiefs themselves, however, were not passive beneficiaries of outside chance. They took advantage of the additional military resources of the nearby Western Isles of Scotland by importing galloglass mercenaries to settle on their lands from the later thirteenth century, and encouraging a full-scale Scottish invasion by Edward Bruce in 1315–18, which significantly undermined the power of the de Burgh earls. Subsequently they hired periodic regiments of ‘redshanks’ from the West Highlands and Islands for campaigns in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These were reinforced by ‘kerne’ (cethernaig) or native Irish mercenary foot soldiers, and the financial pressure of maintaining such armies increased the burden of taxation in food and billeting-rights on the indigenous population. At the same time the presence of these troops, responsible only to their employer, increased the arbitrary authority of the ruling lords at the expense of their own landowning subjects. There was a chronic lack of capital to invest in economic development, while the chiefs themselves seem to have cultivated a Spartan admiration for exclusively military virtues, which found expression in the late fourteenth century in a fashion for going barefoot.184 Armagh and Derry quickly lost their status as centres of literature and learning. All this began to change in the fifteenth century as the great Anglo-Irish chief governors turned from attempts to suppress and conquer the Ulster leaders to seeking their alliance and cooperation. Safe-conducts were issued to merchants, a brisk trade in fish developed with Spain, monasteries were founded for the Third Order Franciscans and even a limited number of castles were built.185 The chieftains once more wore shoes, and in some cases quite expensive and fashionable apparel.186 It was not, however, until the deputyships of the 8th and 9th earls of Kildare that the Ulster chiefs and their military strength were viewed as an asset to central government. Gerald Mór used the army of Áed Ruad I O’Donnell at the Battle of Knockdoe, and later brought Áed Dub with a small but effective force to Munster to assist him against the MacCarthys and O’Briens in 1510. In 1523, Gerald Óc was to find Conn Bacach O’Neill of great assistance, not just to defeat the midland Irish, but to intimidate them into submission without fighting, and to take an active part in negotiating a settlement with them.187 Interestingly the potential benefits of this approach were clear to the earl of Surrey, later duke of Norfolk,188 but his lone voice was too easily dismissed by the English

184 Simms, ‘The barefoot kings’. See above, pp 131–2. 185 On merchants and trade see above, note 17; W.R. Childs and Timothy O’Neill, ‘Overseas trade’ in NHI 2, pp 492–524, at pp 504–6; Timothy O’Neill, Merchants and mariners in medieval Ireland (Dublin, 1987), pp 24, 56. 121; on monasteries see map ‘The spread of the religious orders, 1420–1530’ by F.X. Martin in NHI 2, p. 485; on castles, see above pp 168, 170–3, 175, 183–4. 186 Simms, ‘The barefoot kings’, pp 17–18; Mac Eiteagáin, ‘The Renaissance and the late medieval lordship of Tír Conaill, 1461–1555’, pp 220–1. 187 Above, p. 220 188 Above, pp 218, 223.

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administration. The Butlers, as he pointed out, were not in a geographical position to combine defence of the Pale with control of the Gaelic Irish, but they had received preferential status at court through their connection with Anne Boleyn; and it was clearly the constant interference of the Butler faction that encouraged Áed Dub O’Donnell to persist in his war against Conn Bacach O’Neill, whereas the cooperation of Magnus O’Donnell and Conn Bacach through the Geraldine League, to protect the life and liberty of the young 11th earl of Kildare, foreshadowed the later alliance of ‘Red Hugh’ O’Donnell and the Great O’Neill during the Nine Years War. Strangely, in view of later history, the imposed religious reforms were not a decisive factor in alienating the Gaelic chiefs, since we find Magnus O’Donnell and ‘Shane the Proud’ O’Neill at different times petitioning Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth as heads of the church to appoint their respective favoured candidates as bishop of Elphin and archbishop of Armagh under the new dispensation.189 A report sent to Master Thomas Cromwell in 1533 by a self-styled son of an English-born Englishman (with an Irish mother), possibly the Butler agent Robert Cowley, contains a casual remark suggestive of where the problem lay. Referring to the outbreak of disorder after the earl of Kildare was severely wounded while besieging Birr Castle, he comments: These mysadventures, soo notable, in soo short tyme happenyd, hath lyftid upp the hartis of the Irishrie, that before suffrid myserie, and were alway in great drede of the Kinges Deputies; soo that oonles they be with spede driven into their dennes, in their prestynate state, moche inconvenyencies and destruccions woll not faile to ensue.190 Both the bestial association of the expression ‘dens’, and the wish that the Irish should return to a pristine state of misery, accord with the common use of the term ‘wild Irish’ in this period. The intangible benefit the Geraldines to some extent offered the Ulster leaders, by intermarriage, fosterage and alliance, and what was completely lacking from their successors, was ‘parity of esteem’. The library of Gerald Mór, the 8th earl of Kildare, clearly shows that he was quite conversant with the culture of his Gaelic neighbours,191 a culture to be discussed in the next section.

189 Simms, ‘O’Friels ghost’, pp 402–3; J.B. Leslie, Armagh clergy and parishes (Dundalk, 1911), pp 9–11. 190 State papers, Hen. VIII, pt 3, 1, p. 169. 191 Aisling Byrne, ‘The earls of Kildare and their books at the end of the Middle Ages’, The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 14:2 (2013), 129–53: 151–3; Simms, ‘The Geraldines and Gaelic culture’, pp 264–77.

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SECTION TWO

Culture and Society

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CHAPTER

7

Kings and kingship Scholars have written much about certain features of kingship, as described in the Old Irish law tracts and early Irish literature, that find parallels in the early stages of that institution in other societies with an Indo-European background, both in Western Europe and Asia.1 Some archaic customs survived in Ireland and Scotland, and even elsewhere in Europe, right up to the end of the seventeenth century.2 However, as one might expect, inside Ireland kingship evolved with the passing centuries, indeed by the mid-sixteenth century the term ‘rí’ (‘king’) had almost fallen into disuse outside literary sources, and was most frequently replaced by the bare surname, as ‘Ó Néill (O’Neill)’ or ‘Ó Domnaill (O’Donnell)’, emphasizing headship of the royal dynasty rather than rule over a territory or people, while the English administration used phrases like ‘captain of his country’, ‘chieftain of his lineage’, ‘captain of his nation’, or, what bore much the same meaning, ‘captain of his surname’.3 The poets, however, continued to celebrate their patrons’ right to be entitled ‘king’, or even ‘highking’ (rí, airdrí), and to refer to the inauguration ceremony as an ‘enkinging’ (rígad).4 Change had come gradually, and affected some aspects of the institution more markedly than others. The ceremonies of inauguration still took place in the open air, on a traditional mound, where the candidate sat or stood on a stone of inauguration, and in some cases had a shoe placed on his foot or thrown over his head by a leading sub-chief, whose prominent role now replaced earlier customary inauguration of the new ruler by a local poet or cleric5 (Plate XIII). In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries we are told that the surname of the new chief was shouted aloud and repeated by the assembled subjects.6 While this 1 E.g., D.A. Binchy, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon kingship (Oxford, 1970); Myles Dillon, Celt and Hindu (Osbern Bergin Memorial Lecture 3, Dublin, 1973); Maxim Fomin, Instructions for kings: secular and clerical images of kingship in early Ireland and ancient India (Heidelberg, 2013); Jan Puhvel, ‘Aspects of equine functionality’ in Jan Puhvel (ed.), Myth and law among the Indo-Europeans (Berkeley, CA, 1970), pp 159–72. 2 Proinsias Mac Cana, ‘An archaism in Irish poetic tradition’, Celtica, 8 (1968), 174–81; Marc Bloch, The royal touch: sacred monarchy and scrofula in England and France, trans. J.E. Anderson (London, 1973). 3 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 32–9. 4 See, for example, the work of the late sixteenth-century poet Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn – Knott, Tadhg Dall, passim. 5 Elizabeth FitzPatrick, Royal inauguration in Gaelic Ireland, c.1100–1600: a cultural landscape study, Studies in Celtic History 22 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2004), pp 4–12. 6 John O’Donovan (ed.), The genealogies,

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ceremony is called in Irish gairm anma, ‘the proclamation of the name’, the fact that in earlier sources the phrase gairm ríge, ‘the proclamation of kingship’, occurs, suggests that the inaugurator may once have called out the new ruler’s title as king of the relevant territory or population group, rather than his surname – indeed surnames did not develop before the tenth to twelfth centuries.7

SUCCESSION TO KINGSHIP

In the Old Irish law tracts there was little distinction drawn between the process for succession to the office of a king or lesser chief and to the office of head of an ordinary landowning kindred (cenn fine). The cenn fine held responsibility for presiding over the division and re-division of the kin’s heritable lands (fintiu), for collecting and handing over tribute, taxes and fines incurred by the kindred (fine), for prosecuting any wrong committed against a kin member and leading them to war in cases where there was no noble patron involved to take over these duties.8 This office was endowed, we are told, with the cumal senorba, ‘the senior heir’s measure of land’, a choice portion of the inheritance that was not subject to the frequent divisions and reassignments of the rest of the kin-lands, and did not descend to the previous kin-head’s son unless he too had been elected to the office of ‘senior heir/kin-head’.9 In practice, the most likely candidate to succeed as the next ‘senior heir’ was not the son, but the brother of the previous leader since, in the case of ordinary landowning families, increasing stress came to be laid on personal age, or seniority, as a prime qualification for authority within the kindred.10 As discussed above in the Introduction, political authority in the lead-up to the twelfth century came to be focussed on larger and larger territorial units, and armies in the later Middle Ages made increasing use of professional soldiers, so the duties of a kin-head became less active, and an elderly kinsman remained quite competent to carry out the legal oversight of family affairs which became the major part of his responsibilities. The celebrated maxim from Old Irish law ‘Sinser la fine, febtu la flaith, eccna la heclais’, ‘Seniority for the family, worth for the ruler, [Latin] learning for the church’, highlights the practical distinction that had to be made between tribes and customs of Hy-Fiachrach (Dublin, 1844), pp 425–52. 7  Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 28–39. 8 Etchingham, Church organization, pp 372, 390; Kelly, Early Irish law, pp 13–14; T.M. Charles-Edwards, ‘Críth Gablach and the law of status’, Peritia, 5 (1986), 53– 73: 56, 64, 72; Binchy, Críth Gablach, p. 70; Rudolf Thurneysen, ‘Aus dem irischen Recht (1. Das Unfrei Lehen)’, ZCP, 14 (1923), 335–94: 345, 369–70. 9 Charles Plummer, ‘Notes on some passages in the Brehon laws’, Ériu, 10 (1926–8), 113–29: 113–14. 10 Katharine Simms, ‘Changing patterns of regnal succession in later medieval Ireland’ in Frédérique Lachaud and Michael Penman (eds), Making and breaking the rules: succession in medieval Europe, c.1000– 1600/Établir et abolir les norms: la succession dans l’Europe médiévale, vers 1000–1600 (Histoires

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succession to this kind of authority within a family, and succession to political power, unless Ireland was to be ruled by a gerontocracy of ‘elder statesmen’. Febtu, or ‘worth’, can be translated as ‘excellence, wealth, status’. In Irish society these meanings are hardly to be distinguished, since wealth bought clients, clients were the pre-requisite for noble status, and the grades of nobility were measured by the number of clients a man possessed.11 In the words of a later commentator, ‘the eldest of a family should be put at the head of that family, and the person with most clients and power, if he is equal in nobility to his elder, should be put into the sovereignty or lordship.’12 Rather than the cumal senorba, ‘the senior heir’s portion of land’, the territorial king was to take over the ‘three chief mainstays’ (na tri conntairisme) of the kingdom, glossed as ‘houses or fortresses’. More optimistically, it was stated he should be the son and grandson of previous kings (not necessarily his immediate predecessors), and be free of the guilt of unjustified slaying or any theft at all.13 In the twelfth century, at the time when the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland took place, Irish customs with regard to royal succession were not as archaic, in comparison to other societies, as they were to appear in later centuries. Succession to kingship in Ireland was confined to an established royal dynasty in each territory, only an adult male member of such a dynasty was eligible, and preference was given to ‘seniority’, this meaning both seniority of descent and of personal age. In practice, an Irish king was normally succeeded by a brother or a son, but succession was formally determined by a council in which both the royal family and the nobles of the territory took part, and there was the legal provision that if a junior candidate were ‘better qualified’ in terms of wealth and political following, he could succeed in preference to the senior kinsman. This left the door open to sharp competition among potentially eligible candidates, and there were frequent and often violent succession disputes.14 Elsewhere in twelfth-century Europe, royal succession was not completely routine either. It was still a matter of debate whether a woman or a child could inherit political office, and in England this uncertainty had given rise to the civil war between King Stephen and the widowed Empress Matilda, and later ensured that the claim of the young Arthur of Brittany to inherit the English throne was passed over in favour of his uncle, King John.15 Although France’s Capetian dynasty provided an unbroken succession of sons to succeed their de Famille/La Parenté au Moyen Age, no. 9, Turnhout, 2008), pp 161–72, at pp 164–5, 168. 11 Charles-Edwards, ‘Críth Gablach and the law of status’. 12 Ó Muraíle, The Gt Bk of Ir. Gen., 1, p. 185; see Simms, ‘Changing patterns of regnal succession’, p 163–4. 13 Katharine Simms, ‘The contents of later commentaries on the Brehon law tracts’, Ériu, 49 (1998), 23–40: 35–8. 14  Jaski, Early Irish kingship, pp 113–70; Donnchadh Ó Corráin, ‘Irish regnal succession, a reappraisal’, Studia Hibernica 11 (1971), 7–39; Simms, ‘Changing patterns of regnal succession’. 15 Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin kings, 1075– 1225, New Oxford History of England (Oxford, 2000), pp 4–13.

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fathers, from the founder, Hugh Capet, to the fourteenth century, the most powerful men in the kingdom continued to assemble, nominally to elect the most suitable member of the royal dynasty to succeed to the throne of France, up to the succession of King Philippe Auguste in 1179,16 and this type of election process had greater political reality in other realms such as the Roman empire of the Germans, and in Hungary or Poland.17 What really provoked comment among outside observers of the Irish system of succession was the small size of Irish kingdoms, resembling the baronies and counties of other European countries, for which the prevailing succession system had, by that time, become primogeniture. This could be either strict primogeniture, where the eldest son succeeded his father, and on the death of this eldest son his child, even if a daughter, succeeded in preference to his own brothers, or a system of primogeniture ‘in tail male’, where the eldest son was normally succeeded by his own eldest son, but if he had no sons, his next brother took his place. In each case, the succeeding heir of the previous baron or count was bound to do homage to the local ruler and, in England, they had to pay a ‘relief ’ or fine in order to receive permission to succeed to their predecessor’s holding.18 In Gaelic Ireland some similarities to this system developed by the later Middle Ages with respect to the lesser chieftainships of the cantreds or tuatha. Although each succeeding chief was initially selected by his own family members and the leading landowners in his territory, confirmation by his overlord or ‘king’ became indispensable, often symbolized by the king handing his subject-chief the ‘rod of ownership’ (slat sheilbe) or ‘rod of lordship’ (slat tigernais), once a function reserved for the local poet or church leader. In this later period we hear of payments not unlike the feudal ‘relief ’, made by the newly confirmed chief to his lord, known as ‘rod money’.19 However this acknowledgment was one of political subordination, and did not involve landownership of the subject territory, either for the minor chief or his overlord, as the freeholders of Ulster indignantly protested on the eve of the Ulster Plantation.20 It is significant that the Anglo-Norman Walter de Burgh, earl of Ulster, agreed in 1269 that Áed Buide O’Neill held, not the land of Tír Eógain, but his 16 Robert Fawtier, The Capetian kings of France, monarchy and nation (987–1328), trans. Lionel Butler and R.J. Adam (London and New York, 1966), pp 48–50. 17  Bernd Kannowski, ‘The impact of lineage and family connections on succession in medieval Germany’s elective kingdom’ in Making and breaking the rules (as above, note 10), pp 13–22; Martyn Rady, ‘“They brought in an ox as king; they elected and installed him”: the royal succession in later medieval Hungary’, ibid., pp 61–70; Dániel Bagi, ‘Changer les règles: la succession angevine aux trônes hongrois et polonais’, ibid., pp 85–95. 18  Marc Bloch, Feudal society, trans. L.A. Manyon (2nd ed., London, 1962), pp 204–7; Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and vassals: the medieval evidence reinterpreted (Oxford, 1994), pp 367–73. 19 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 30–1, 134, 136. 20 Sir John Davies, ‘Letter to the earl of Salisbury, 1607’ Morley, Ire. under Eliz. & Jas I, pp 348, 375–6, 386–7. See also N.P. Canny, ‘Hugh

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‘kingship’ (regalitas) from the earl.21 In 1342, a review of the dower arrangements for the widowed Countess of Ulster stated that in 1333, the year that the ‘Brown Earl’, William de Burgh, was assassinated, Henry O’Neill was paying 300 cows a year ‘to have the whole lordship (pro toto dominio) of Tír Eógain’,22 again avoiding the question of landownership. Perhaps in each case this wording reflected indentures drawn up between the Irish king and the earl, which had some input from the Irish king’s legal advisors. Elsewhere the records of the earldom routinely refer to the Irish kings holding their ‘land (terra)’ from the earl in return for services and/or payments.23

K I N G S H I P A N D L A N D OW N E R S H I P

A chieftain’s contract of submission to a higher king normally committed himself and his people to pay an annual tribute to their overlord, to follow him to war, and to obey his proclamations or edicts,24 but had no relevance in Irish law and custom to the question of landownership, though there are signs that the greatest of the mid-twelfth-century provincial kings and high-kings wished to claim that it had. In his charter endowing the Cistercian monastery of Newry c.1156/7, the northern high-king Muirchertach MacLaughlin claimed direct ownership of all land under the jurisdiction of sub-kings who acknowledged his authority.25 The fact that King Muirchertach was subsequently hounded to his death by his own subjects26 may in part explain why this claim by an Irish king to be dominus terrae, ‘lord of the land’ under his sway, was not repeated before the controversial claims of the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell in the early seventeenth century. Already by the sixteenth century, there is clear evidence that O’Neill, O’Donnell, and in south Munster MacCarthy Mór, all claimed the right to confirm the election of not merely the kin-heads or sub-chiefs on their mensal lands, but every chieftain within their respective kingdoms, and commonly O’Neill, earl of Tyrone and the changing face of Gaelic Ulster’, Studia Hibernica, 10 (1970), 7–35: 10, 15. 21 HMC, Report on the MSS of Lord de L’Isle and Dudley I (London, 1925), pp 31–2. See Katharine Simms, ‘Late medieval Tír Eoghain: the kingdom of the “Great O’Neill”’ in Tyrone Hist. & Soc., pp 127–62, at p. 141. 22 London, Public Record Office: Chancery Miscellanea C 47/10/20/14. See above, p. 119. 23 G.H. Orpen, ‘The earldom of Ulster, pt IV’, JRSAI, 45 (1915), 123–42: 141; Robin Frame, ‘A register of lost deeds relating to the earldom of Ulster c.1230–1376’ in Seán Duffy (ed.), Princes, prelates and poets in medieval Ireland (Dublin, 2013), pp 85–106: 101, 106. 24 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 99–115. 25 M.T. Flanagan, ‘The context and uses of the Latin charter in twelfth-century Ireland’ in H. Pryce (ed.), Literacy in medieval Celtic societies (Cambridge, 1998), pp 113–32, at p. 118; Flanagan, Ir. royal charters, pp 112, 117, 119, 292–3. See above, pp 78–9. Flanagan compares Mac Lochlainn’s claim to ownership of his subject kings’ land with similar clauses in charters issued by Diarmait Mac Murchada (d.1171). 26 AU 2, pp 154–5 (AD1166).

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charged a fee for such confirmation.27 This fee marked the gradual transition from the ‘ascending’ pattern of power, beloved of Ullmann,28 where the ruler’s position is legitimated by the will of his subjects, to the ‘descending’ pattern of authority, spreading from the top down, more generally prevalent in the late Middle Ages. In the early seventeenth century we find a difference of opinion among ruling chieftains in Ulster immediately prior to the Flight of the Earls and the Ulster plantation. O’Neill and O’Donnell, who had been created earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell respectively, claimed that they were the ultimate owners of all the lands that lay within their political jurisdictions, not merely the lands in the ‘Loughty’ (lucht tige, ‘the household’) or mensal lands that endowed the office of the chief. They argued the chieftains who ruled under them were mere tenants, who could be evicted at will – a claim that was naturally hotly contested by such powerful subject chiefs as O’Cahan of Derry and O’Doherty of Inishowen.29 Where O’Neill and O’Donnell saw their advantage in claiming the whole of their territories as fiefs held of the English king under feudal law, making their subjects freeholding tenants, the sub-chiefs were insistent on their rights as dúthchasaig, hereditary landowners under Brehon law. All hereditary land in Gaelic Ireland was in Continental terms ‘allodial’, that is, it was the absolute property of the family who owned it. Hereditary land descended by agnatic kinship, through the male lines only. There was also some non-hereditary land, which included estates of formerly hereditary land that had been sold, given or pledged to an outsider, with the consent of all the kindred who might have otherwise claimed to inherit it,30 or else ‘swordland’, which had been conquered from a kindred by military force.31 It occurs as a condition of some mortgages in late medieval and early modern Brehon law charters, that land ‘pledged’ in return for a payment of moveable wealth remained open to be redeemed by the original family from its new owners for three generations before it could become theirs absolutely,32 although purchase in fee simple becomes increasingly frequent in the sixteenth-century charters. Unless or until it passed the three-generation watershed, or some other agreed deadline, such pledged land was the individual property of the new holder, comparable to cattle or 27 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 30–1. 28 Walter Ullmann’s views on medieval political thought have been summarized and criticized by Francis Oakley, ‘Celestial hierarchies revisited: Walter Ullmann’s vision of medieval politics’, Past & Present, 60 (Aug. 1973), 3–48. 29 Nicholas Canny, ‘The treaty of Mellifont and the re-organization of Ulster, 1603’, Irish Sword, 9 (1969–70), 249–62; idem, ‘Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, and the changing face of Gaelic Ulster’, Studia Hibernica, 10 (1970), 7–35. 30 Gearóid Mac Niocaill, Ireland before the Vikings (Dublin, 1972), p. 51; Etchingham, Church organization, pp 436–7, 450. 31 See RIA Dictionary, s.v. ‘ferann cloidim’. 32 James Hardiman (ed. and trans.), ‘Ancient Irish deeds and writings chiefly relating to landed property from the twelfth to the seventeenth century’, RIA Transactions, 15 [Antiquities] (1825–8), 2–95: 18–19, 53–4. On the threegeneration rule, see Jaski, Early Irish kingship, p. 181.

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precious metals and could, for example, be used to endow a man’s daughters,33 who could not inherit more than a life interest in family land, nor transmit it to their sons. The pattern once common in Europe, whereby a man’s land was divided among all his sons,34 persisted in Gaelic Ireland to the end of the sixteenth century, although qualified by elaborate provisions for the re-division of his estate among the extended kin-group in cases where the landowner died leaving no children, or only daughters, or sons who were still underage, with a further division taking place when these minor sons attained their majority. Sir John Davies, writing in the early seventeenth century, compared the Irish system of ‘partible inheritance’ with the old Kentish custom of ‘gavelkind’.35 Hereditary landowners, urrada, later styled dúthchasaig, were the backbone of the legal system. They and their families could act as guarantors or ‘oathhelpers’ in the courts, they could sue and be sued, they bore arms, their lands were subject to an annual tribute to the local ruler, and they owed military service when summoned to war with due notice (normally three days) announced at a public assembly.36 Collectively they constituted the túath, and consequently they had the right, in theory, to participate in choosing their ruler but, in practice, major decisions were taken by maithe na túaithe, the ‘good men’ or magnates of the tuath, in other words, the nobles.37 This became increasingly the case from  the twelfth century onwards, and it is symptomatic of the gradual disenfranchisement of minor landowners that the words urrada and airig, which in the Old Irish law tracts signified the free landowners of the tuath, in later literary sources regularly were used for ‘nobles’.38

T H E H I E R A R C H Y O F A U T H O R I T Y: C L I E N T S H I P A N D P O L I T I C A L SUBMISSION

According to Old Irish law, what distinguished a noble from an ordinary free landowner was his exercise of authority over other freemen, his ‘clients’ or ‘companions’ (céli). The law tracts, which were compiled under clerical 33 Myles Dillon, ‘The relationship of mother and son, of father and daughter, and the law of inheritance with regard to women’ in Studies in early Irish law [ed. D.A. Binchy] (Dublin, 1936), pp 129–79, at pp 133 and note 4–4, 174–5. 34 See Thomas Kuehn, ‘Inheritance, Western European’ in J.R. Strayer (ed.), Dictionary of the Middle Ages VI (New York, 1985), pp 454–61. 35 Kelly, Early Irish law, pp 102–5; Davies, ‘Letter to the earl of Salisbury, 1607’ in Morley, Ire. under Eliz. & Jas I, p. 372; Hiram Morgan (ed.), ‘ “The lawes of Irelande’: an hitherto unidentified tract by Sir John Davies’, Irish Jurist, new ser., 28–30 (1993–5), 307– 13: 11–12. 36 Kelly, Early Irish law, pp 5, 223; T.M. Charles-Edwards, ‘A contract between king and people in early medieval Ireland? Críth Gablach on kingship’, Peritia, 8 (1994), 107– 19: 114–17; D.A. Binchy, ‘Distraint in Irish law’, Celtica, 10 (1973), 22–71: 39–40. 37  Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 44–8; 60–78. 38  RIA Dictionary, s.v. 3 aire and aurrae/aurrad. On the reduced status of minor freemen in the twelfth century see Gearóid

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influence, describe the contract of clientship largely in economic terms. A wealthy man who owns more cattle than he can graze on his own lands, loans out some of his herds to other less wealthy landowners, who benefit from the dairy produce and calves, and yield their patron an annual render in stock and foodstuffs. However the details show that much more is involved. ‘Base clients’ (dáerchéli), who were normally committed to this contract for life, might sometimes receive land rather than, or as well as, livestock. They rendered labour service on the lord’s estates at harvest-time, and received in addition a downpayment, the sét turchluide, or ‘chattels of subjection’, to buy out their ‘honourprice’ (lóg n-enech); that is, their lord became responsible for avenging their wrongs, but also for enforcing the payment of any debts they owed, duties that would otherwise belong to the cenn fine, the head of their own kindred.39 ‘Noble clients’ (sáerchéli) were only committed to their contract with their patron for a fixed number of years – three, seven or ten – after which it could be abandoned or renewed, and they retained responsibility for defending their own ‘honour’ at law, but they rendered a higher annual payment, and owed their lord service of escort to public assemblies and legal trials. Both grades of client performed their military service to the túath as part of their lord’s retinue, while those not bound to a clientship contract were led to war by their own kin-head, or cenn fine.40 Marilyn Gerriets has compared the relationship between the political submissions of the heads of noble kindreds to their local king, or the submission of minor kings to the kings of provinces, with private contracts between early Irish clients and their patrons. Her conclusion was that there were indeed many parallels between the political contract of submission and the private contract of clientship, but that there were also differences.41 The obvious distinction between clientship, as defined in the law tracts, and political submission, frequently described as ‘coming into his [the superior king’s] house’ (techt ina thech), was that the ad hoc contract (cor, or connrad) of political submission, though the terms might vary, almost always included the surrender of hostages as a guarantee of continued obedience.42 Like the system of small local kingdoms, the custom of ‘clientship’ was once common to other societies in Europe. References to the early law of the ‘Ten Tables’ in ancient Rome indicate that clientship there had once had a similar economic base, although it later became a vaguer bond involving political Mac Niocaill, ‘The origins of the betagh’, Irish Jurist, new ser., 1 (1966), 292–8. 39 Kelly, Early Irish law, pp 29–32; Mac Niocaill, Ireland before the Vikings, pp 60–5; Thurneysen, ‘Aus dem irischen Recht (1. Das Unfrei Lehen)’, 345. 40 Kelly, Early Irish law, pp 32–3; Mac Niocaill, Ireland before the Vikings, pp 60–1; Simms, ‘The contents of later commentaries’, 26–30; Simms, ‘Gaelic warfare’, at p. 107. 41 Marilyn Gerriets, ‘Economy and society: clientship according to the Irish laws’, CMCS, 5 (1983), 43–61; eadem, ‘Kingship and exchange in pre-Viking Ireland’, CMCS, 13 (1987), 39–72. 42  Simms, From kings to

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influence.43 The ‘clients and debtors’, described by Julius Caesar as escorting the Gaulish chief Orgetorix to his trial and intimidating the judges,44 were performing a service of escort similar to the ‘free clients’ in Old Irish law. In the rest of Europe, such early customs are seen as part of the cultural background leading to high medieval institutions, binding free men to their lords by oaths of homage and fealty. In England and the English colony in Ireland, such oaths became closely linked with the receipt of grants of land to be held as tenancies.45 Irish society in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was experiencing change and is sometimes described as developing along ‘feudal’ lines.46 Whether or not modern historians’ concept of a ‘feudal system’ answers to the detailed realities of medieval Europe,47 the Irish political organization differed from each of the traditional models given for ‘feudalism’, in the sense that it did not involve the downward delegation of either jurisdiction and/or land tenure48 from a higher authority. Local rulers in Ireland, even those whose titles by the twelfth century were demoted to a mere chieftain (dux in Latin or toísech in Irish), were not viewed as exercising their authority to tax and judge their subjects, or lead them to war, as powers delegated from above by the king to whom they had submitted. In the words of the law text Críth Gablach, ‘it is the people [túath] which ordains a king, it is not the king which ordains a people … an edict of native law (Fénechas) – the peoples adopt it, it belongs to the king to enforce it.’49 Besides this customary law (fénechus), individual kings and chiefs could issue a proclamation (fógra) on some particular topic, with the imposition of fines for breach of these proclaimed laws (cána), or a series of agreed arrangements could be drawn up by treaty between two kingdoms to allow for mutual lawenforcement under the terms of their ‘friendship’ (cairdes).50 The upward chain of authority that linked nobles to their local chief, and chieftains to their over-king was documented in 1297, in the terms of the articles agreed by King Brian MacMahon of Airgialla (Monaghan area) with the bishop of Clogher and with Primate Nicholas Mac Máel Ísa. Not only Brian himself, warlords, pp 96–100. 43 Andrew Drummond, ‘Early Roman clientes’ in Andrew WallaceHadrill (ed.), Patronage in ancient society (London and New York, 1989), pp 89–115, at 101, 105. 44 Caesar, De Bello Gallico, Lib. 1, cap. 4. 45 See the forms of homage and fealty in the earl of Kildare’s rental book, AD1518: Mac Niocaill (ed.), Crown surveys of lands, 1540– 41, p. 279. 46  Byrne, Irish kings, p. 269; Ó Corráin, Ireland before the Normans, p. 32. 47 Questioned in Reynolds, Fiefs and vassals, passim. She has summarized her argument: ‘Fiefs and vassals after twelve years’ in Sverre Bagge, M.H. Gelting and Thomas Lindqvist (eds), Feudalism: new landscapes of debate (Turnhout, 2011), pp 15–26. The three editors of this anthology on the subject have concluded ‘Feudalism in practice differs considerably from Ganshof ’s neat picture … but it seems premature to pronounce its death at the present moment’, ‘Introduction’, ibid., p. 13. 48 See E.L. Ganshof, Feudalism, trans. Philip Grierson (New York, 1964), pp xv–xvii. 49 Charles-Edwards, ‘A contract between king and people’, 108, 110, 112; Eoin MacNeill, ‘Ancient Irish law: the law of status or franchise’, PRIA, 36C (1923), 265–316: 302–3; Binchy, Críth Gablach, pp 19–20, ll. 493–4, 515–16. 50 Kelly, Early

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but his subordinate chieftains, variously styled regulus, dominus and dux (the Latin equivalents for uirrí, tigerna and toísech, ‘sub-king’, ‘lord’ and ‘chief ’),51 jointly agreed that a follower who assaulted or robbed a cleric or church tenant must be fined, in the first instance by his own patron or employer, and if this authority proved negligent, by ‘he who in time past was wont to enforce such fines’ (the territorial lord, successor of the rí túaithe) and if this local lord also failed to exact justice, responsibility passed to the king, Brian MacMahon.52 As far as the law tracts and their compilers were concerned, the Irish political system operated in what Walter Ullmann would describe as an ‘ascending theory’ of power,53 established by voluntary contracts between client landowners and nobles, then between nobles and local kings, then between minor chiefs or kings and their paramount lords. Nevertheless the realities of frequent violent conquest distorted this theoretical model. In the late thirteenth century there is no suggestion that if Brian MacMahon failed to take action over a plea it could be appealed to Domnall O’Neill of Tír Eógain as provincial king or paramount chief. It was a grievance explicitly voiced by Niall Óc O’Neill at the end of the fourteenth century that the interposition of the earl of Ulster’s authority operated to take away his lordship over the other rulers in the province.54 However this role in enforcing justice was restored in later centuries to the paramount chiefs, who were in effect the early modern successors of the provincial kings. A condition of the submission of Maguire, lord of Fir Manach, to his overlord O’Donnell in 1542 was that all fines for manslaughter in Fir Manach would be shared equally between Maguire himself and O’Donnell.55 This carried with it the implication that if Maguire failed to prosecute a murder in his territory, the case could be appealed to O’Donnell, who had a financial interest in seeing that justice was done. Similarly Henry O’Neill in 1463 authorized the issue of safe-conducts guaranteeing immunity from attack for merchants travelling ‘through the sea-ports of the earldom [of Ulster], on behalf of himself and his other nobles and subjects of the aforesaid earldom’,56 an apparent reference to the lordships of Magennis of Iveagh in county Down, MacQuillin of the Route and the O’Neill of Clandeboy, if not also to the Scottish MacDonald of the Glens of Antrim and the Anglo-Irish lords of Lecale and the Ards in county Down. An examination of literary and historical texts, rather than the law tracts, indicates that the ancient Irish custom of clientship was already experiencing changes from the tenth to thirteenth centuries. Instead of an economic contract, Irish law, p. 5. 51 Uirrí, earlier airrí, actually meant one who ruled on behalf of a king, that is, a viceroy or satrap (see Quin, Dictionary), but in later medieval Ulster it seems to have acquired the less precise meaning of sub-king or subject chief, see Simms, From kings to warlords, p. 69. 52  Nicholls, ‘The register of Clogher’, 412–23. See below, pp 305–6. 53 See above, p. 238. 54 Curtis, Richard II, pp 143–6, 222–4. 55 Ann. Conn., pp 726–7 (AD1542). 56 RONI Register of Primate John Prene, Lib. I, f. 182r. (My translation). See

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where a loan of chattels, or occasionally land, entitled the patron to an annual render of foodstuffs, escort and service, ‘free clientship’ (sáerchélsine) was now replaced by an explicit contract of military service (óglachas) in return for a onceoff down-payment (tuarastal), confirming the recipient’s submission, together with maintenance and wages (also termed tuarastal) for soldiers brought by the submitting noble on any expedition outside the home territory, for the duration of that expedition. This later contract of submission could be seen as modelled on the purely mercenary contracts whereby eleventh- and twelfth-century Irish kings recruited the services of Viking or Ostmen leaders from the Norse kingdom of Dublin or the Western Isles of Scotland.57 Some political submissions were held to be sufficiently validated by the very act of accepting tuarastal from the superior king, but it was more usual to guarantee obedience by also surrendering hostages. These were normally members of the submitting chieftain’s own kin or foster-kin, who could be of any age or sex, and who remained thenceforth at the superior king’s residence, sometimes as honoured guests, sometimes in chains, depending on the relationship between the subject chief and his overlord thereafter. In cases where the chieftain who had submitted subsequently rose out in armed rebellion, his hostages could be executed. Consequently, the overlord was anxious to select those hostages whose death would cause the subject king maximum pain, either emotionally or politically. In some cases, a submitting king was required to yield hostages not only from his own kindred but also kinsmen of his leading subjects, who would therefore have their private reasons for not wishing to support him in a future rebellion.58 Where the hostages were children, their subsequent treatment could differ little from a kind of fosterage at court, if their relatives behaved themselves.59 Just as nobles were ranked in order of importance according to the number of base and free clients under them, the Old Irish law tracts rank the higher grades of kings by the number of minor kings who had entered into contracts of submission to them.60 However, they do not lay down general rules concerning the rights that an over-king acquired by such submission, for the very good reason that such rights were individually negotiated. It was left to the senchaide, the professional historians, to compile tracts recording the traditional rights asserted by major kings over their subject territories. The earliest surviving tract of this nature, on the rights of the king of Cashel (provincial king of Munster) over his subject populations,61 dates back to the time of the law tracts themselves, while among the latest examples is Ceart Uí Néill (‘the Right of O’Neill’), a above, p. 189. 57 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 96–104. 58 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 67–8, 107–10, 117–19. 59  Ute Kühlmann, Die irische Ziehkindschaft im europäischen Kontext (Husum, 2017), pp 408–11. 60 Charles-Edwards, ‘Críth Gablach and the law of status’. 61 J.G. O’Keeffe (ed.), ‘Dál Caladbuig and reciprocal services between the kings of Cashel and various Munster states’ in Ir. Texts I, pp 19–21.

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compilation on the claims of the Great O’Neill over the chiefs of Ulster, preserved in a paper manuscript of the seventeenth century, in which the individual territories’ obligations can be shown to have been drawn up in several different periods and circumstances, and it is probable that at no one point in time could all have been enforced simultaneously.62

A D M I N I S T R AT I O N A N D C O N T R O L

The eleventh and twelfth centuries, between the rise of the innovating high-king from Munster, Brian Boru (d.1014), and the Anglo-Norman invasion (1169), saw power consolidating in the hands of a few provincial kings and a handful of other rulers of significant territories of secondary size, such as Osraige, Breifne or Airgialla. The increased employment of mercenary forces, and the introduction of quasi-mercenary contracts for paid military service between sub-kings or  subject chieftains and their overlords no doubt played a part in this development.63 The more powerful Irish kings in this period were noticeably influenced by Continental models of royal authority, seen in their presiding over reforming church synods, their use of Continental formulae in charters, and employment of royal officials such as ‘chancellors’ and ‘seneschals’.64 However, the forward progress of centralization of power under a few great Irish kings in the twelfth century was halted by the Anglo-Normans’ arrival. In the later Middle Ages, the functions of the high administrative officials of the twelfth century, many of them ordained clerics, are taken over by hereditary lay aristocrats.65 The break-up of the provincial kingdoms, which followed on the AngloNorman invasion and the long-drawn-out wars of conquest, resulted in a number of minor kingdoms, even those composed of a single túath, acquiring considerable independence of action, a notable example being the Magauran (Mág Shamradáin) chieftainship of Tellach Echach (barony of Tullyhaw) in north-west Cavan.66 This meant that the wars taking place during the period of Gaelic recovery in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were devoted, not merely to wresting back border territories from English ownership, but to forcing minor independent Irish chieftains to submit to a reconstructed over-kingship. 62 Myles Dillon (ed.), ‘Ceart Uí Néill’, Studia Celtica, 1 (1966), 1–18; Éamon Ó Doibhlin (ed.), ‘Ceart Uí Néill’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 5 (1969–70), 324–58; Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 2–3. 63 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 101–3, 118; M.T. Flanagan, ‘Irish and Anglo-Norman warfare in twelfth-century Ireland’ in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A military history of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), pp 52–75, at pp 64–6; Seán Duffy, ‘The pre-history of the galloglass’ in Seán Duffy (ed.), The world of the galloglass: kings, warlords and warriors in Ireland and Scotland, 1200–1600 (Dublin, 2007), pp 1–23, at pp 1–8. 64  Flanagan, Ir. Royal charters, pp 237–50; Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 11–13. 65 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 79–95. 66 See Lambert McKenna (ed.), The Book of

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Ulster even saw an attempt to re-create the wider provincial kingdom of Ulaid, the ‘kingdom of Conchobar mac Nessa’ which had vanished since the Iron Age.67 Arguing solely from the logic of the customary law system expressed in the Old Irish legal tracts, Binchy had held that an over-king did not have the right to displace the indigenous royal dynasty of a túath.68 However, in practice overkings had from time to time displaced earlier dynasties in territories subject to them.69 Some of the most closely dateable and best documented examples relate to the period of the high-kings ‘with opposition’ in the eleventh and twelfth centuries,70 but the ruthless expansion of the Uí Néill across mid-Ulster from the seventh to the eleventh centuries was also accompanied by the displacement of a number of minor royal dynasties in favour of relatives or allies of the Uí Néill over-kings.71 Admittedly for this earlier period caution is required, because the evidence is largely genealogical and unrelated native dynasties could on occasion cause fresh genealogies to be drawn up linking them to the Uí Néill family tree for diplomatic reasons, as in the case of the Fir Tulach (barony of Fartullagh, county Westmeath), discussed by Byrne.72 In Tír Conaill and Fir Manach, poets, historians and hospitallers are shown to have been settled on tax-free royal mensal lands.73 In the case of O’Neill of Tír Eogain, the lands lying between the royal inauguration site at Tullahogue near Cookstown and the Great O’Neill’s chief residence at Dungannon were known as the ‘Loughty’, the lucht tige or ‘household’ of O’Neill (see ‘Lotie’, i.e. lucht tige or ‘household’ in Plate XIII), and the chieftains who occupied these lands were called, in the later period, the ‘horsemen’ or fírcheithern, the ‘true troop’ of Ó Néill. Like the hospitaller family of MacManus (Mac Magnusa), who administered the mensal lands of Maguire, king of Fir Manach, the horsemen of O’Neill were exempt from ordinary taxation but paid a high food render from their lands, collected by the leading chieftain, O’Devlin (Ó Doiblin).74 In Magauran (Dublin, 1947), p. ix. 67  Above, pp 124–5, 129–31, 136, see also Katharine Simms, ‘Propaganda use of the Táin in the later Middle Ages’, Celtica, 15 (1983), 142–9. 68 Binchy, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon kingship, p. 32. For a critique of Binchy’s conception of early Irish kingship see Patrick Wormald, ‘Celtic and Anglo-Saxon kingship: some further thoughts’ in Paul E. Szarmach (ed.), Sources of Anglo-Saxon culture: papers from the Symposium on the Sources of Anglo-Saxon Culture, held in conjunction with the 18th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, May 5–8, 1986 (Kalamazoo, MN, 1986), pp 151–83. 69 D.A. Binchy, ‘Secular institutions’ in Myles Dillon (ed.), Early Irish society: An sean shaol in Éirinn (Cork, 1954), pp 52–65, at p. 65; Ó Corráin, Ireland before the Normans, pp 30–2; idem, ‘Nationality and kingship in pre-Norman Ireland’ in T.W. Moody (ed.), Nationality and the pursuit of national independence, Historical Studies XI (Belfast, 1978), pp 1–35, at p. 10. 70 AI, pp 244–5, 286–7 (AD1093, 1126), AFM 2, pp 1024–5, 1072–3 (AD1126, 1143); M.T. Flanagan, ‘Mac Dalbaig, a Leinster chieftain’, JRSAI, 111 (1981), 5– 13. 71 Ó Ceallaigh, Gleanings, pp 73–4; James Hogan, ‘The Uí Briain kingship in Telach Óc’ in Féilsgríbhinn Eóin Mhic Néill, pp 406–44, at pp 409, 423–4. 72 Byrne, Irish kings, pp 142–3. 73  Below, pp 377, 380. 74  Dillon, ‘Ceart Uí Néill’, 10–11; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Carte MS 55, f. 591 (I am grateful to Professor Nicholas Canny for this reference);

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addition, these privileged minor chieftains and their armed followers performed special military and police duties, guarding hostages and prisoners, enforcing the payment of punitive fines for theft or smuggling, or collecting food-tribute from subject territories, taking a commission from the profits of such renders.75 Genealogically, these sub-chieftains on the ‘household’ lands were descendants of the proto-historical Eógan, son of Niall of the Nine Hostages, and thus part of O’Neill’s wider Cenél Eógain dynastic grouping, brought eastwards and southwards from the vicinity of Inishowen by O’Neill’s ancestors, to colonize lands once occupied by chiefs of the northern Airgialla.76 There is a certain ambiguity as to whether O’Neill’s ‘horsemen’ are to be regarded as hereditary landholders, bound to successive O’Neills by a petrified contract of clientship, or whether they are hereditary office-holders settled as tenants on lands ultimately the property of successive kings of Tír Eógain. In favour of the latter interpretation was the subsequent introduction of the MacDonald constables of O’Neill’s galloglass troops onto lands in this area near Ballygawley, about the fourteenth century, and actions of the last resident earl of Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill, in settling his foster-brother and secretary, Henry Hovenden of Dundalk, on an estate in the ‘Loughty’, along with other favoured Anglo-Irish allies and administrators.77 A much more drastic example of an overlord’s imposition of foreign rulers on sub-kingdoms within his own territory was the case of the three MacSweeney (Mac Suibne) galloglass dynasties originating as a single Scottish family from Argyle, who were installed successively in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as lords over three districts of Tír Conaill by their O’Donnell employers in exchange for well-defined contracts of military service and tribute.78 Sixteenth-century MacSweeney tradition told of a ruthless massacre of the O’Breslin (Ó Breisléin) dynasty who had previously held the lordship of Fanad. However the last O’Breslin lord to be recorded in the annals was slain by Domnall Óc O’Donnell in 1263, possibly in connection with the quarrels then rife over the diocesan boundaries of Raphoe and the reform of church discipline. A further entry in 1281 indicates the lordship of Fanad had passed in the first

Éamon Ó Doibhlín, Domhnach Mór (Donaghmore): an outline of parish history (Omagh, 1969), pp 43–62. The place-name ‘Loghtee’ or ‘household [lands]’ is also applied to the two baronies closest to the chief residence of O’Reilly in Cavan. 75  Dillion, ‘Ceart Uí Néill’, p. 11; Ó Doibhlín, ‘Ceart Uí Néill’, pp 353–4. 76 F.J. Byrne, ‘Ireland and her neighbours, c.1014– c.1072’ in NHI 1, pp 862–98, at p. 880. 77  Canny, ‘Hugh O’Neill’, pp 8–9; Nollaig Ó Muraíle (ed.), From Ráth Maoláin to Rome: Turas na dTaoiseach nUltach as Éirinn (Rome, 2007), p. 413. 78 Pól Breatnach (ed.), Leabhar Chlainne Suibhne: an account of the Mac Sweeney families in Ireland, with pedigrees (Dublin, 1920); Katharine Simms, ‘Images of the galloglass in poems to the MacSweeneys’ in Duffy (ed.), The world of the galloglass, pp 106– 23, at pp 107–9; Kenneth Nicholls, ‘Scottish mercenary kindreds in Ireland, 1250–1600’, ibid., pp 86–105, at pp 91–3; and see above, p. 121.

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instance into the hands of the MacMenamins (Meic Meanmain Uí Domnaill), who are later found as clerics and erenaghs in Raphoe diocese,79 while grants of territory in Fanad to MacSweeney appear to have first been made in the midfourteenth century.80 Another and more usual way by which local dynasties found themselves displaced in later medieval Ulster was through the spread of the over-king’s own family members to take control of different regional lordships in his kingdom. Since this was primarily a change of lord rather than a change of landownership, the previous royal dynasty in the area seems often to have remained in situ, abandoning their claim to rule and taking their place among the other local landowners and nobility as subjects of the new chieftain. Thus in the fifteenth century we see the O’Flynn family, who were kings of Uí Thuirtre in south-east Derry and south Antrim until the mid-fourteenth century, now warring in company with the O’Neills of Clandeboy, who had supplanted their power in the area.81 Similarly the O’Muldoon (Ó Máeldúin) dynasty were lords of Lurg in Fir Manach in the fourteenth century, but by the end of the fifteenth were intermittently rebellious followers of the Clann Áeda Maguire, descendants of Áed Maguire (d.1426) who long ruled western Fir Manach as the Maguire king’s brother and tánaiste, or deputy-king.82 By the late fifteenth century the spread of various branches of the Maguire family to establish minor lordships throughout Fir Manach, the spread of the O’Reilly dynasty to hold much of east Breifne, or Cavan, and the spread of the younger brothers of Prince Henry mac Eógain, the Great O’Neill, to found a series of local dynasties across Tír Eógain (counties Derry, Tyrone and north Armagh) amply justified the comment of the seventeenth-century genealogist Dubhaltach Óg Mac Firbhisigh: The great princes, when their families and their kindreds multiply, tend to oppress, wither and despoil their clients and their followers. Look at Ireland, and the whole world, if you wish, and there is no end to the examples you will find of that.83

79 Below, pp 297–8; ALC 1, pp 486–9, 528–9; AU 2, pp 360–1, 400–1 (AD1281, 1303); Edward Maguire, A history of the diocese of Raphoe, Part I, Ecclesiastical (2 vols, Dublin, 1920), pp 82– 4; Pádraig Ó Gallachair, ‘Coarbs and erenaghs of Co. Donegal’, Donegal Annual, 4:3 (1960), 272–81: 276. 80 Breatnach, Leabhar Chlainne Suibhne, pp 30–3; See Simms, ‘Images of the galloglass’, p. 108. 81 William Reeves, ‘Notice of a record preserved in the Chapter House, Westminster’, PRIA, 5 (1850–3), 132–6: 132–3; see above, p. 189. 82 AU 3, pp 442–3, 462– 5, 606–7 (AD1499, 1503, 1536); Simms, ‘Medieval Fermanagh’ in Fermanagh Hist. & Soc., pp 90–3. 83 ‘As gnáth do na hardfhlaithibh (an uair a iomdhaighid a cclanna agus a ccinéula) foirdhinge, feódhughadh, agus fásughadh a ccéleadh agus a lucht leanamhna. Feuch Ére agus an doman uile, dia ttugrae fén, agus ni fhoil foircheann ar a ffuighe do esiomláiribh ann do sin’: Ó Muraíle, The Gt Bk of Ir. Gen., 1, pp 180–1. See also Toirdhealbhach Ó Raithbheartaigh (ed.), Genealogical tracts, I (Dublin, 1932), p. 31.

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In confirmation of Mac Firbhisigh’s appeal to the example of the wider world, one can argue that the sub-division of the over-king’s realm into a series of jurisdictions subject to members of a king’s own dynasty was paralleled by developments that took place in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England and France, and probably for much the same reason. In Ireland the war of reconquest against the English, and in England and France the Hundred Years War, had led to an increasing professionalism in the armed forces used, whereby every major lord commanded a retinue of battle-hardened warriors in his service, presenting an imminent threat to the king’s authority.84 Almost everywhere the great men who constituted this threat were bought off with grants not only of particular landed estates, but taxation rights and jurisdiction over considerable areas of the respective kingdoms. Inevitably this indulgence merely increased their power and brought about savage civil wars. In England and Spain the crown eventually regained control of the situation through the support of the lesser nobility and townsfolk, who backed legislation in their representative assemblies to disarm the nobility.85 In France representative assemblies were gradually discontinued in favour of building up a strong professional army under the crown, which gave it the power to defeat and disarm the magnates.86 The Irish paramount chiefs could be said to have favoured the French solution, insofar as they found any solution at all. The cell-like chain of command that built up an Irish paramount lordship did not include elected delegates to a representative assembly. Those who attended the councils of paramount chiefs were the highest nobles in the land,87 consequently part of the problem, not part of the solution. As mentioned above, the O’Donnell dynasty, who early suffered a prolonged and destructive civil war in the mid-fourteenth century, delegated jurisdiction of considerable areas of their kingdom to their mercenary commanders, the MacSweeneys, in preference to junior members of their own dynasty. Even entrusting newly-won territory in the Finn Valley to Nechtain O’Donnell (d.1452), next brother and tánaiste of King Niall Garb II (d.1439), ended by sowing the seeds of renewed civil war.88 The fifteenth century also saw civil war among the O’Neills of Tír Eógain, and the sixteenth century was marked by the wholesale importation of significantly large regiments of Scottish mercenaries known as ‘red-shanks’ from the outer Isles, whose backing became a decisive basis for the power of both Toirdelbach Luinech O’Neill in Tír Eógain and Áed son of Magnus O’Donnell in Tír Conaill.89 84 Michael Powicke, ‘The English aristocracy and the war’ in Kenneth Fowler (ed.), The Hundred Years War (London and New York, 1971), pp 122–34; Philippe Contamine, ‘The French nobility and the war’, ibid., pp 135–62 at 148–9. On Irish developments see below, pp 422–3. 85 M.V.C. Alexander, The first of the Tudors: a study of Henry VII and his reign (London, 1981), pp 132–9; J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (London, 1970), pp 86–96. 86 J.R. Major, Representative government in early modern France (New Haven, 1980), pp 44–5; Fowler (ed.), The Hundred Years War, pp 17–20. 87 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 64–74. 88 Above, pp 168–9, 171, 183–4. 89 G.A. Hayes-McCoy, Scots mercenary forces in Ireland

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The altered terminology of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries may reflect the distorting effect that these social changes were having on the operation of the túath or local community of free landowners as the basic political unit. In the late fifteenth-century annals a number of minor leaders in Ulster society are no longer styled toísech or ‘chieftain’ as their predecessors or ancestors had been, but cenn aicme ‘head of a kindred’,90 or cenn fedna, ‘head of a [military] company’.91 The sixteenth-century practice of designating almost all Gaelic Irish rulers up to and including the ‘Great O’Neill’ by their surname only suggests their authority was now perceived as based primarily on headship of their own ruling dynasty, rather than on their role as lord of the free landowners in their territory.92 To these two transforming influences, that is, the spread of the overlords’ dynasties at the expense of their subject chieftains and the unanswerable might of the professional armies, was added a third reason for the former túatha to be superseded as meaningful political units by the end of the Middle Ages. This was the increasing mobility of chieftains and their followers throughout the northern half of Ireland, but particularly in Ulster. In wartime conditions they could and frequently did cross territorial boundaries bringing with them not only their military retinues but their non-combatant subjects and the livestock they owned, consolidated into a vast herd, known as a ‘creaght’ or cáeraigecht.93 By 1610, Tobias Caulfield, who collected the earl of Tyrone’s rents on behalf of the English government for the three years immediately following the ‘Flight of the Earls’ to the Continent in 1607, described the whole of central Ulster as controlled by ‘heads of creaghts’, intermediate lords who collected rent or tribute for Áed Ó Néill, earl of Tyrone, from the earl’s ordinary subjects or ‘tenants’, keeping back a quarter of the proceeds as their personal revenue.94

THE IDEOLOGY OF KINGSHIP: KING VERSUS KIN-HEAD

If the later Middle Ages saw a gradual change in basis of the kings’ or chieftains’ power from consent of the free landowners (expressed through the nobles of the territory) to command of large mercenary armies and claims to landownership, (1565–1603) (Dublin, London, 1937), pp 98–102, 138; Hiram Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion: the outbreak of the Nine Years War in Tudor Ireland (Woodbridge, Sussex, 1993), p. 92; Simms, ‘Changing patterns of regnal succession’, p. 169. 90  AU 3, pp 214–17 (AD1466 – Mac Amlaim Méig Uidir). 91 AU 3, pp 244–5, 248–9, 276–7, 278–9 (AD1472 – Ó Catháin, 1473 – Mac Aeda Méig Uidir, 1481 – Ó hAnnluain, 1482– Ó Néill Buide). The expression cenn fedna is also applied to the baron of Delvin who died in 1475 (AU 3, pp 256–7). 92 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 32–5, 38–9. 93 Katharine Simms, ‘The origins of the creaght: farming system or social unit?’ in Margaret Murphy and Matthew Stout (eds), Agriculture and settlement in Ireland (Dublin, 2015), pp 101–18, and see above, p. 160 below p. 474. 94 Calendar of the state papers relating to Ireland, 1609–10, p. 533.

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one could ask whether the ideology of kingship or the expectations of the chieftains’ subjects changed also? A series of Irish language tracts giving advice to kings on how to rule,95 of which the two best known are the seventh-century Audacht Morainn (‘the Testament of Morand’) and the later, perhaps partially ninth-century, Tecosca Cormaic (‘Teachings of Cormac [mac Airt]’),96 indicate that hereditary churchmen and the other learned classes such as the filid, senchaidi and breithemain (poets, historians and judges) considered it a chief duty of their professions to preserve the distinction between the office of kingship as a sacred trust, and the more mundane power attaching to the head of a powerful landowning family or the head of an armed force. It has been speculated that these tracts were read or recited as part of the inauguration ceremony for Irish and Scottish kings in the early Middle Ages.97 Parallels with Brahminic texts from India, and more fragmentary correspondences in other early IndoEuropean literatures suggest Irish teaching on kingship evolved from preChristian traditions,98 although the written texts have been adapted to bear a clear Christian message. The seventh-century Latin homily ‘On the twelve abuses of the world’ (De duodecim abusivis saeculi) is generally viewed as of Irish origin.99 This preached that it was the essence of kingship that a king be just, and correct the injustice of others: For the righteousness of a king is to oppress no man unjustly through the exercise of power, to give judgement between one man and another without acceptance of persons, to be the defender of strangers (i.e., aliens and refugees), orphans and widows; to restrain robbery and theft, to punish adultery, not to promote the wicked to high office, not to patronize actors or practitioners of lewd and filthy pastimes, to rout the ungodly from the land, to permit no parricide or perjurer to live, to defend the churches, to nourish the poor with alms, to set good men in charge of the affairs of his kingdom, to have those who are old and wise as counsellors, to pay no heed to the superstitions of magicians and soothsayers and sorceresses, to restrain his anger (or ‘not to harbour anger’), to defend his country justly and valiantly against adversaries, to put his confidence in all things in God, 95 These are listed in R.M. Smith, ‘The Speculum Principum in early Irish literature’, Speculum, 2 (1927), 411–45. 96 Kelly, Audacht; Kuno Meyer (ed.), Tecosca Cormaic: the Instructions of King Cormac mac Airt (Todd Lecture series 15, Dublin, 1909). See Edel Bhreathnach, ‘Perceptions of kingship in early medieval Irish vernacular literature’ in Linda Doran and James Lyttleton (eds), Lordship in medieval Ireland: image and reality (Dublin, 2007), pp 21– 46, at pp 23–6. 97 Kelly, Audacht, pp xiv–xv. 98 Fomin, Instructions for kings, pp 17–55; Byrne, Irish kings, pp 7–27. 99 Aidan Breen, ‘De XII abusiuis: text and transmission’ in Próinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter (eds), Ireland and Europe in the early Middle Ages:texts and transmission/ Irland und Europa imfrüheren Mittelalter: Texte und Überlieferung (Dublin, 2002), pp 78–94, at pp 81–3.

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not to be elated in spirit with good fortune, to bear up patiently under adverse circumstances, to keep the true faith in God, not to permit his children to do anything wicked, to set aside certain times for prayer, not to dine before the proper hour.100 God would bless the reign of such a just king with prosperity, peace and fine weather, while the unjust ruler would draw down plagues, lightnings and famine on his unfortunate subjects. Enemies would invade his borders, wild animals attack the flocks and herds, and his sons and grandsons would not inherit the kingship after him.101 The supernatural link portrayed here between the king’s justice and the weather conditions, fertility and public health experienced during his reign reflects a widespread belief found in pre-Christian and non-European societies also, and there has been some discussion as to how far it reflects the preChristian beliefs of Ireland continued and adapted to the moral message the Christian church wished to instil into the secular rulers of early medieval times.102 The concern for the king’s interior spiritual life found in the ‘Twelve Abuses’ tract belongs to a wider clerical mind-set in the seventh and early eighth centuries typified by the Venerable Bede’s description of the spiritual influence exercised by the virtuous Irish bishop Aidan over Oswald (d.642) and Oswin (d.651), the pious kings of Northumbria.103 Within Ireland a similar role for the church is seen in the concluding passage of the eighth-century law tract Críth Gablach, which sets the dignity of a bishop above that of a king.104 100  ‘Iustitia vero regis est neminem iniuste per potentiam opprimere, sine acceptatione personarum inter virum et proximum suum iuste iudicare, advenis et pupillis et uiduis defensor esse, furta cohibere, adulteria punire, iniquos non exaltare, impudicos et histriones non nutrire, impios de terra perdere, parricidas et periurantes vivere non sinere, ecclesias defendere, pauperes elemosynis alere, iustos super regni negotia constituere, senes et sapientes et sobrios consiliarios habere, magorum et ariolorum phitonissarumque superstitionibus non intendere, iracundiam suam differre, patriam fortiter et iuste contra adversarios defendere, per omnia in Deo confidere, prosperitatibus animum non elevare, cuncta adversa patienter tolerare, fidem catholicam in Deum habere, filios suos non sinere impie agere, certis horis orationibus insistere, ante horas congruas non gustare cibum’. Both text and translation here are taken from the most recent edition by Aidan Breen in an unpublished Ph.D. thesis, ‘Towards a critical edition of De XII abusivis saeculi’ (Trinity College Dublin Thesis no. 1530, 1988), pp 400–9 – additions in round brackets are Breen’s. See Breen, ‘De XII abusiuis: text and transmission’. An unsatisfactory printed version of the text may be found in Wilhelm Hartel (ed.), S. Thasci Caecili Cypriani opera omnia 3: Opera spvria, indices, praefatio (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum III, pars 3, Vienna 1871), p. 166; see also Siegmund Hellmann (ed.), Ps.-Cyprianus. De xii abusiuis saeculi (Leipzig, 1909). 101  Breen, ‘De XII abusivis saeculi’, pp 406–9; Hartel, S. Thasci Caecili Cypriani opera omnia, 3, p. 167. 102 McCone, Pagan past, pp 138–60; Jaski, Early Irish kingship, pp 57–88. 103 Bede: Historia Ecclesiastica, Lib. 3, cap. vi, xiv – see Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (eds), Ecclesiastical history: by Bede the Venerable, saint (revised ed., Oxford, 1991), pp 230–1, 256–61 or Leo Sherley-Price, Bede: a history of the English church and people (London, 1955), pp 150–1, 164–6. 104 Binchy,

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Tracts on kingship in the Irish language are more secular in content than the Latin ‘Twelve Abuses’ tract, and seem to emanate from the law schools, as the Audacht Morainn includes a helpful passage on the qualities by which various commodities or properties are to be valued, and the Tecosca Cormaic has a section on common faults when pleading one’s case in a law court.105 Nevertheless they preach a clear moral message to the king. As the Audacht Morainn declaimed: ‘Let him be merciful, just, impartial, conscientious, firm, generous, hospitable, honourable, stable, beneficent, capable, honest, well-spoken, steady, truejudging’. The features in common between the Audacht and the Twelve Abuses tract are most famously the promise of fertility and fine weather for the just ruler, but also there is the exhortation to appoint well-qualified administrators: ‘let him not exalt any judge unless he knows the true legal precedents’.106 The king should enforce the fulfilment of any contract in which he is directly involved, should defend his homeland against unjustified attacks from outside and should not take bribes to favour the rich over the underprivileged: let him give any reciprocal service which is due from him, let him enforce any bond which he should bind, let him remove(?) the shame of his cheeks by arms in battle against other territories, against their oath(?), against all their protections. Tell him, let not rich gifts or treasures or profits blind him to the weak in their sufferings.107 The general observation in the ‘Twelve Abuses’ that the king’s righteousness is the peoples’ peace (pax populorum) is applied more specifically in the Audacht to the maintenance of order at the three main occasions for public assemblies, at horse-races, musterings of the army, or banquets.108 Whereas the ‘Twelve Abuses’ presents the king in a relationship with God, who will reward righteousness and punish iniquity, in the Audacht Morainn the king’s primary relationship is with the landowning families, the fine and their political communities or túatha. Let him care for his túatha, they will care for him. Let him help his túatha, they will help him. Let him soothe his túatha, they will soothe him … Tell him, let him not redden many fore-courts, for bloodshed is a vain destruction of all rule and of protection from the fine for the ruler.109

Críth Gablach, p. 24; MacNeill, ‘Ancient Irish law’, p. 306; Breen, ‘De XII abusiuis: text and transmission’, p. 80. 105  Kelly, Audacht, pp 10–15; Meyer, Tecosca Cormaic, pp 40–3. 106 Kelly, Audacht, p. 9. 107 Kelly, Audacht, pp xviii, 11. 108 Kelly, Audacht, pp 8–11. 109 Kelly, pp 4–5, 10–11.

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A failure to mention the role of the Christian God in relation to the duties of the king is particularly noticeable in the ‘B’ recension of Audacht Morainn, which led to debate on whether this version of the text expressed a pre-Christian tradition of kingship,110 but the omission seems to arise from the legal as opposed to pastoral preoccupations of the writer. The law tract Críth Gablach, which sets the status of a bishop above that of a king, similarly presents kingship as a contract between the king and his túath, or túatha if he is an over-king.111 There is some evidence for the existence of ecclesiastical inaugurations in early medieval Munster, the provenance of the Audacht Morainn: in a fragmentary liturgy where each acknowledgment by the king of the ecclesiastical exhortations to justice and promised blessings meets the response ‘Amen, Amen’ from the assembled congregation;112 and we have one comparatively late explicit statement in the Annals of Ulster that the abbot of Armagh conferred ‘kingly orders’ on Áed O’Neill of Craíbe Telcha (d.1003) in 993, four years after O’Neill’s political accession to power.113 Neither in the law tracts nor the ‘Instructions’ to kings do we find any imagery of the king as a bridegroom who symbolically ‘marries’ his territory, or his office of kingship, in the ceremony of royal inauguration. Yet allusions to the ‘woman of sovereignty’ in various guises occur throughout the early genealogies and saga material, the texts associated with the senchaidi, or ‘custodians of tradition’.114 Where the symbolism of marriage to the kingship personified as a female entity is found, it is closely associated with the themes of prosperity and good weather rewarding the king’s ‘truth’ (fír flathemon) and famine and disaster pointing to the king’s ‘lie’ (gó flatha). The ‘woman of sovereignty’ herself is shown as beautiful and radiant when the king is right for her, and ugly and threatening if the king is wrong, and this is linked to the blossoming or withering of the land.115 In such contexts the ‘king’s truth’ is not limited to the justice of his judgements, it also concerns his true descent from the royal dynasty and personal suitability in terms of physical perfection, mental ability and brave and generous character.116 The king’s blossoming bride as a symbol of a kingdom prospering under his righteous rule was to prove a fruitful literary image for centuries to come, and it adapted easily to the changed circumstances of the 110 Proinsias Mac Cana, Regnum and Sacerdotium: notes on Irish tradition (London, 1981), p. 448; McCone, Pagan past, pp 140–1; Jaski, Early Irish kingship, pp 72–81. 111 CharlesEdwards, ‘A contract between king and people’. 112 Kelly, Audacht Morainn, pp xiv, 72–4. 113 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster, pp 424–5. See Byrne, Irish kings, p. 256. 114 Proinsias Mac Cana, ‘Aspects of the theme of king and goddess in Irish literature’, Études Celtiques, 7 (1955–6), 76–114, 356–413; 8 (1957–8), pp 59–65; T.F. O’Rahilly, ‘On the origins of the names Érainn and Ériu’, Ériu, 14 (1943), 7–28; Tomás Ó Máille, ‘Medb Chruachna’, ZCP, 17 (1927), 129–46. 115 Máire Herbert, ‘Goddess and king: the sacred marriage in early Ireland’ in L.O. Fradenburg (ed.), Women and sovereignty, Cosmos Yearbook 7 (Edinburgh, 1992), pp 264–75; A.K. Coomaraswamy, ‘On the loathly bride’, Speculum, 20 (1945), 391–404. 116 McCone, Pagan past, pp 121–4; Calvert Watkins, ‘Is tre fír flathemon:

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English conquest when the sovereignty of Ireland could be portrayed as a sick or dying woman, a wife raped by foreign invaders,117 or an unfaithful wife who deserted her true spouse for the sake of foreign bribes.118 However Jaski has pointed out that although the pre-Christian celebration of the Tara kingship was traditionally referred to as the Feis Temrach, ‘the weddingfeast of Tara’ and even later a ceremonial inauguration of the king of Connacht in 1310 was described as a banfheis ríge, ‘a kingship marriage’, none of the recorded rituals of inauguration whether literary accounts of the Tara kingship, or descriptions of the inauguration of later medieval kings and chiefs, involve any symbolic marriage or mating119 except for the strange horse sacrifice described by Giraldus Cambrensis as taking place among a certain people in twelfth-century Tír Conaill.120 Jaski concluded from this that the expression banfheis toísigechta, ‘marriage of chieftainship’, which is still encountered in the annals as late as the fifteenth century, was merely a petrified phrase understood by contemporaries as ‘feast of chieftainship’, and that the poetic ideal of the land as the king’s wife or lover which continued to be expressed into the seventeenth century was no longer linked in the minds of the ordinary people to a ceremony marrying the king to the land.121 In point of fact the phrase bainfheis ríge is a comparatively rare expression for a royal inauguration in the surviving literature. The more usual terms were rígad, ‘an enkinging’, oirdned, ‘an ordaining’, gairm ríg or gairm anma, ‘the proclaiming of a king’ or ‘proclaiming of the name’, the latter term arising from the practice of styling later medieval and early modern Irish chieftains by their surname only, after an inauguration ceremony in which one or more traditionally authorized persons formally transferred the office of chieftainship to the new candidate and then shouted his surname aloud, a shout repeated by the assembled subject nobles, clerics, men of learning and freeholders.122 The scanty records of inauguration rites do not tell us much about the meaning of kingship in the eyes of those who performed the ceremony. The practice of receiving the office of kingship while sitting or standing on a venerated stone at a traditional open-air location in the territory derives from a common Indo-European heritage of great antiquity.123 The use of a single shoe in the ritual, whether placed on the king’s foot as in fifteenth-century Connacht, or thrown over the ruler’s head as in the late sixteenth-century inaugurations of marginalia to Audacht Morainn’ Ériu, 30 (1979), 181–98. 117 See above, p. 127. 118 E.g. ‘Do fríth monuar an uain si ar Éirinn’, in Cecile O’Rahilly, Five seventeenth-century political poems (Dublin, 1952), pp 3–11, and see further Breandán Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar: na Stíobhartaigh agus an t-aos léinn, 1603–1788 (Baile Átha Cliath, 1996), pp 469–82. 119 Jaski, Early Irish kingship, pp 63–6. 120 Below, pp 291–2. 121 Jaski, Early Irish kingship, p. 65; Ann. Conn., pp 572–3 (AD1475). See also the entry describing the consecration of Rosa Mág Uidir as bishop of Clogher as a bainnsiugadh or ‘wedding-feast’: AU 3, pp 164–5 (AD1449). 122  FitzPatrick, Royal inauguration, p. 8; Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 32–5. 123 FitzPatrick, Royal inauguration, pp 99–108.

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O’Neill, has similarly ancient origins and uncertain symbolism.124 In cases where the new king placed one or both feet in the outline of a footprint carved into the inauguration stone125 he was symbolically undertaking to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors, and bardic poetry indicates that following in the lorg or ‘track’ of one’s ancestors was indeed seen as a kingly virtue.126 The handing over by the appointed inaugurator of a slat ríge or ‘rod of kingship’ to the new king can be seen as relating both to a custom of legally transferring landownership by the symbolic handing over of a twig,127 and to the earlier presence of sacred trees at traditional inauguration sites.128 The deisiul, where the inaugurator makes a right-hand circuit of the king three times, is a form of blessing or good luck charm found in modern Scottish folklore,129 and occurs in the saga Cath Maige Tuired as a way of invoking victory in battle.130 Pace Jaski, the subsequent handing over of the king’s inauguration costume to the officiating inaugurator as one of his perquisites has been identified as a custom elsewhere associated with wedding rituals.131 One of the fullest descriptions of medieval Irish inauguration comes in the late fifteenth-century or early sixteenth-century ‘Second Life of St Máedóc’, patron saint of the churches of Ferns in Wexford and Drumlane in county Cavan. This Life as a whole is a composite text in prose and verse, containing some twelfth-century material,132 and it contains two separate prose passages referring to the inauguration of the kings of Breifne, as well as a number of poetic allusions. The first and fuller prose version states: The horse and robes of the king of Breifne on his coronation day [an lá ríoghfaidher é] to be given to the family of Máedóc … Máedóc’s Brec [a house-shaped relic] to be carried round the king, to pledge him thereby [a cur a slanaibh fair] to do right between man and man, whether weak or powerful. It is to be carried moreover, in front of the men of Breifne, in every battle and every contest, and is to go round them right-hand-wise, and they shall return safe … The king himself to go on the morrow of his coronation [d’éis a ríoghtha] to Drumlane or Rossinver with an offering, and (then) he need not fear sickness or disease until the last sickness. He 124 Ibid., pp 122–9; J.F. Killeen, ‘Fear an énais’, Celtica, 9 (1971), 202–4; Proinsias Mac Cana, ‘The topos of the single sandal in Irish tradition’, Celtica, 10 (1973), 160–6. 125 FitzPatrick, Royal inauguration, pp 108–22. 126 Aith., poem 5, verses 1, 19; DiD, poems 74, verse 7; 79, verse 5; 102, verses 8, 37. 127 Simms, From kings to warlords, p. 31. 128 FitzPatrick, Royal inauguration, pp 58–9. 129 Samuel Ferguson, ‘On the ceremonial turn, called “Desiul”’, PRIA: Polite Literature and Antiquities, 2nd ser., i, (1879), 355–64. 130 Killeen, ‘Fear an énais’, p. 204; E.A. Gray (ed.), Cath Maige Tuired: the Second Battle of Mag Tuired (Naas, 1983), pp 58–9. 131 Mac Cana, ‘An archaism’. 132 Charles Doherty, ‘The transmission of the cult of Maedhóg’ in Proinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter (eds), Ireland and Europe in the early Middle Ages: texts and transmission (Dublin, 2002), pp 268–83, at pp 274–83; Raymond Gillespie, ‘A sixteenth-century saint’s life: the second Irish Life of St Maedoc’,

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages shall have length of life here, and the kingdom of God in the other world finally, in return for performing all the things that we have said. And further it rests upon the king himself to exact the tribute and dues of Máedóc from small and great throughout the land and lordship …133

It is striking that both prose and verse extracts from this source use the terminology of a legal contract in connection with the king’s obligation to judge justly between strong and weak, suggesting that the conferring of kingship is conditional on his carrying out his undertakings, although it is not made clear whether this contract is between the king and his subjects, as in the earlier law tract, Críth Gablach, or between the king and his God, represented by the hereditary clerics of Drumlane, who lay more stress on the importance of receiving their own privileges from the king than on his duty to uphold justice. From a different part of Ireland the Leabhar Breac, an early fifteenth-century manuscript anthology of moral and religious tracts compiled in the law school of the MacEgans of Ormond, contains a ‘Sermon to kings’ in Latin and Irish. The Latin version is largely taken up with a direct citation of the passage on just and unjust kings from the seventh-century ‘Twelve Abuses’ tract, using the version ascribed to pseudo-Augustine rather than the better-known pseudoCyprian recension, and the Irish version is a later translation and elaboration of the Latin. The Leabhar Breac anthology is an example of a trend by which Irishlanguage material originating in the tenth to twelfth-century pre-reform church schools found a new lease of life in the fifteenth century, mingling with more recent translations of religious material into the vernacular for the edification of pious laymen.134 The Irish translation and elaboration of the tract may indeed belong to the later medieval period, as it extends some of its exhortations to the king to apply to pious laymen in general: he should keep in his memory his credo according to the teaching of the apostle, together with the Lord’s prayer, the pater; for it is required of every Christian that he should possess these two in his memory and recollection, his credo and his pater.135 The most notable additions in the Leabhar Breac Latin text to the original exhortations of the seventh-century ‘Twelve Abuses’ tract as cited above136 are Breifne, 10:40 (2004), 147–54. 133 Charles Plummer (ed.), Bethada Náem nÉrenn (2 vols, Oxford, 1922), 1, pp 202–3; 2, pp 196–7 (section 44). My square brackets. 134 Katharine Simms, Medieval Gaelic sources, Maynooth Research Guides for Irish Local History no. 13 (Dublin, 2009), pp 85–7. 135 ‘din co ro-techta do mebair a créda iar forcetul in apstail, imalle fri hernaigthe in cóimded fodén .i. fris-in pater; uair is ed dlegair da cech cristaige, co ro-techta in déda-sin aicce i n-a chuimne fén 7 i n-a fhoraithmet .i. a chredo 7 a phater’ – Robert Atkinson (ed.), The passions and homilies from Leabhar Breac (Dublin, 1887), pp 157, 408. 136 Above,

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an insistence that the king should have only one legitimate wife, because Solomon the wise king was led into idolatry by a plurality of wives, and a curse on any king who hesitated to impose the death penalty on sinners.137 The Irish translation is slightly less bloodthirsty, seeing the death penalty as a last resort: For the king [is justified] who condemns and restrains wicked men, and who hangs and kills them, if he cannot restrain them by the other ways by which their chastisement is lawful, i.e. by spoliation and depriving them of their wealth, by exile and prison, by fetters and pit, and even by mutilation of their limbs.138 The church had long argued for the death penalty for serious crime in opposition to the system of compensation payments customary in Irish secular law, objecting to the idea that a rich criminal might escape his due punishment,139 but these two points, the reform of Irish marriage customs and the physical punishment of crime, were to be brought to the fore in the course of the extension of the Gregorian church reform to Ireland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The reference to prison, fetters and the pit (carcair 7 cepp 7 cuithi) in the Irish text of the Leabhar Breac is reminiscent of a passage in the verse admonition to a ruler of the Cenél nEógain from an Armagh churchman in the early stages of the church reform period, Cert cech ríg co réil: A hard fetter on the foot, and a red cross(?) on the back [or ‘a strong gallows near by’] A filthy pit, ooze, a prison with its back to the ditch. Water, weapons … fire, risk of betrayal, It is these that cause peace during a gracious king’s reign.140 Similarly, the idealized pen-picture which accompanied the notice of the death of the provincial king of Connacht, Cathal Croibderg O’Conor (d.1224), described him as:

p. 250; Brent Miles, ‘The Sermo ad reges from the Leabhar Breac and Hiberno-Latin tradition’ in Elizabeth Boyle and Deborah Hayden (eds), Authorities and adaptations (Dublin, 2014), pp 141–58. 137 Atkinson, The passions, pp 416–17. 138 Atkinson, The passions, pp 158, 408. 139 Kim McCone, ‘Dubthach Maccu Lugair, and a matter of life and death in the pseudohistorical prologue to the Senchas Már’, Peritia, 5 (1986), 1–35: 8, 17, 30. 140 ‘Gemel crúaid i coiss . is riag rúad ria ais . cuithe salach súg . carcar cúl ri clais . Uisce fóebar feith . tene bóegal braith . isiat dogní síd . re ré cech ríg raith’ – Tadhg O’Donoghue (ed.), ‘Cert cech ríg co réil’ in Osborn Bergin and Carl Marstrander (eds), Miscellany presented to Kuno Meyer (Halle a. S., 1912), pp 258–77, at pp 270–1. Alternative translation in square brackets is from O’Donoghue’s footnote. See below, pp 278–9.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages The king most feared and dreaded on every hand in Ireland; the king who carried out most plunderings and burnings against Galls [AngloNormans] and Gaels who opposed him; the king who was the fiercest and harshest towards his enemies that ever lived; the king who most blinded, killed and mutilated rebellious and disaffected subjects; the king who best established peace and tranquillity of all the kings of Ireland; the king who built most monasteries and houses for religious communities; the king who most comforted clerks and poor men with food and fire on the floor of his own habitation; the king whom of all the kings in Ireland God made most perfect in every good quality; the king on whom God most bestowed fruit and increase and crops; the king who was most chaste of all the kings of Ireland; the king who kept himself to one consort and practised continence before God from her death till his own; the king whose wealth was partaken by laymen and clerics, infirm men, women and helpless folk, as had been prophesied in the writings and the visions of saints and righteous men of old, the king who suffered most mischances in his reign, but God raised him up from each in turn; the king who with manly valour and by the strength of his hand preserved his kingship and rule. And it is in the time of this king that tithes were first levied for God in Ireland.141

It hardly matters how true this outpouring of praise is as a description of the historical king, it is clearly a picture of what the church at that time wished an Irish king to be. The historical narrative underlying the early thirteenth-century entries from both the Annals of Connacht and the Annals of Loch Cé has been seen as the work of one or more churchmen.142 The evidence of the Second Irish Life of Máedóc and the Sermo ad reges in the Leabhar Breac suggests that Irish churchmen continued to demand much the same standards from their kings in the later Middle Ages, but in the province of Ulster the church’s voice lacked a ring of authority between the death of Primate Nicholas Mac Máel Ísa and the rise of the Observant Franciscans.143 Vernacular literature from this period is the product of the poets and the senchaidi, or traditional historians, men who were often hereditary occupants of church lands, but not completely identified with the interests of the institutional church, since they held their posts of learning by appointment from the kings themselves. 141 Ann. Conn., pp 2–5 (AD1224). My addition in square brackets. 142 B.W. O’Dwyer, ‘The Annals of Connacht and Loch Cé, and the monasteries of Boyle and Holy Trinity’, PRIA, 72C (1972), 83–101: 89; Aubrey Gwynn, ‘The Annals of Connacht and the abbey of Cong’, Galway Archaeological and Historical Society Journal, 27 (1956–7), 1–9: 6–9. Gearóid Mac Niocaill, The medieval Irish annals (Dublin, 1975), pp 33–4 criticized this view and argued for authorship by a hereditary historian of the Ó Máel Conaire family, who are known to have continued and enlarged these annals in later centuries, but part of O’Dwyer’s case was that his suggested author, the archdeacon Clarus mac Mailin (d.1251), was a member of the Ó Máel Chonaire family. 143 See below, pp 327–8.

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This slight shift in values can be seen in the qualities for which kings and chieftains are lauded by the annalists when noting the year of their death. Between the death-notice of Cathal Croibderg O’Conor and the year 1500 I have noted 99 laudatory notices of deceased magnates occurring in the Annals of Ulster. Only two of these refer to the repression of crime as one of the ruler’s virtues, both with reference to minor chiefs in fifteenth-century county Clare,144 the first of these notices ending with an ‘etc.’ reinforcing the impression that such mini obituaries originated in a fuller testimonial composed locally, like the extant isolated paragraph of posthumous praise for Donnchad O’Carroll (d.1168).145 Such a testimonial might then circulate among the learned classes in different parts of Ireland, who could take from it such parts as they wished, or summarize the whole in their own annalistic compilations.146 The Annals of Loch Cé contain a particularly eloquent series of death-notices for the O’Donnell kings of Tír Conaill. The thirteenth-century entries are notable for their literary similes beginning with Domnall Mór O’Donnell (d.1241), the son-in-law of Cathal Croibderg O’Conor: a man like Conn Cédchathach for winning every battle, the equal of Cormac grandson of Conn for just judgment, the rival of Art Aenfher for banishing his enemies, the fellow of Brian Borumha in warfare and piety.147 His son Domnall Óc O’Donnell was praised as: The best Gaidhel for hospitality [or ‘honour’] and dignity (einech 7 oirechus), the general guardian (feichem coitchenn) of the west of Europe and the knitting needle of the arch-sovereignty (snathad uamma na hairdrighe) and the rivetting hammer of every good law (farcha dluthaighthe gach degh rechta), the parallel of Conaire son of Eidirscel in purity [or ‘youth’, ar óige] when assuming the sovereignty, the top nut of the Gaidhel in valour (ar ghaisced), the equal of Cathal Crobhderg in battle and attack (ar ágh 7 innsoiged).148 Domnall Óc’s rebellious younger son Toirdelbach, who had contended for the kingship for twelve years against his elder brother Áed, was called on his death:

144  AU 3, pp 104–5, 336–7 (AD1428, 1488). 145  H.J. Lawlor (trans.), St Bernard of Clairvaux’s Life of St Malachy of Armagh (London and New York, 1920), p. 170. 146 The original free-standing eulogy of Cathal Croibderg that led to the annalistic obit may be represented by the passage that now introduces one version of the ‘O’Conor inauguration tract’ – see John O’Donovan (ed.), ‘The inauguration of Cathal Crobhdhearg O’Conor, king of Connaught’, JRSAI, 2 (1853), 335–47: 336–7. 147 ALC 1, pp 352–5 (AD1241). 148 ALC 1, pp 486–7 (AD1281). My alternative translations in square brackets.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages A warlike, active man (fer cogtach cosnamach), the Cúchulainn of Clann Dálaigh in valour (ar gaiscedh). Aedh O Domhnaill resumed his sovreignty (a flaithius fein) … so that after a while his government (a tigerntus) was like the sea growing calm, a tide ebbing and a high wind subsiding.149

The references found in these three death-notices to literary prototypes for particular heroic virtues of the O’Donnell chief in question are not paralleled in the obituaries of other thirteenth-century chieftains, from the O’Neill or O’Conor dynasties, for example, nor are they repeated in later eulogies of O’Donnell rulers. The closest parallel to their phraseology comes in the Annals of Ulster death-notice for the earlier Tír Conaill king, Flaithbertach Ó Máeldoraid (d.1197): Conall for championship (ar laechdacht), Cuchulainn for prowess (ar gaiscedh), Guaire for generosity (ar einech), Mac Lughach for athletics [or ‘warriorship’, óglachus].150 This wording is also found imperfectly reflected in the corresponding Annals of Loch Cé entry on Ó Máeldoraid’s death.151 Since the Annals of Ulster are thought to draw for this period from an ecclesiastical source based in Derry,152 the same source may be indirectly responsible for the later thirteenth-century O’Donnell entries in the Loch Cé annals. The writer or writers clearly considered kings responsible for stability, good order and justice in the land under their control, a constant message of church sources. The same theme is taken up again in the contemporary death-notices in the Annals of Ulster for Áed Rúad I O’Donnell (d.1505), the Great Earl of Kildare (d.1513), Máel Rúanaid O’Carroll, chief of Ely O’Carroll (d.1532), and for the erenagh of Termon Magrath, Cormac Óc Magrath (Mac Craith, d.1536), kinsman of Rúaidri Magrath, one of the patrons of the compilation, which by this date was again the work of clerics.153 Moreover it seems to be clerical authors who occasionally criticize chieftains for vices other than a failure to reward or entertain the professional men of learning. Henry ‘the Turbulent’ O’Neill 149 ALC 1, pp 528–9 (AD1303). 150 AU 2, pp 226–7 (AD1197). My square brackets. Earlier entries in the Annals of Ulster contain comparisons with classical prototypes – Muirchertach ‘of the Leather Cloaks’ is likened to Hector, and Brian Bóruma and Muirchertach Mac Lochlainn to the Emperor Augustus – Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster, pp 390–1, 448–9; AU 2, pp 154–5 (AD942, 1014, 1166). 151 ALC 1, pp 198–9 (AD1196). In this version the comparison with Mac Lugach is missing. The relationship between the late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century entries in the annals of Loch Cé and Ulster is discussed in Gearóid Mac Niocaill, ‘Annála Uladh agus Annála Locha Cé, 1014–1220’, Galvia, 6 (1959), 18–25. 152 Aubrey Gwynn, Cathal Mac Maghnusa and the Annals of Ulster (reprinted from Clogher Record, 2 with introduction and notes by Nollaig Ó Muraíle, Enniskillen, 1998), pp 44–5; Mac Niocaill, The medieval Irish annals, pp 29–30. 153  Gwynn, Cathal Óg Mac

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(d.1392), who is lauded by others for his lavish patronage of poets, was described by Canon Auguistín Magrane (Mag Raidin) as ‘an unjust, wicked and sinful man’.154 Brian O’Neill, who died in 1519, was described in the Annals of Ulster as ‘an eminent cenn fedna [troop leader] … without mercy for clergy or laity, and a man of his ruthlessness was scarce in the Province of Ulster’.155 Otherwise one finds that the commonest qualities for which an Ulster king or chieftain was praised by the medieval annalists were enech, ‘honour’, and engnam, or gaisced, ‘warlike prowess’. These were qualities expected of lay noblemen in general, and not just rulers. Enech has a subtle meaning whose definition takes up eight closely written columns of the Royal Irish Academy Dictionary.156 Basically it is a word for ‘face’, but in the sense of ‘honour’ it means conduct that at all times avoids incurring a blush of shame. Exhibiting cowardice in battle should cause one to blush, tolerating a blow or a verbal insult without exacting retribution either financial or physical would cause one’s cheeks to redden. Insult in the form of a poetic satire was a special case. Since poets were bound by their profession to declare true judgements, one should never earn poetic satire by failing to reward their poems generously, or failing to entertain them lavishly on their visits. Undeserved satire should not be punished by physical violence or a fine, since the persons of poets were privileged and immune. Instead another poet offers to remove the patron’s ‘reddening of cheeks’ by a poem of true praise.157 More generally, hoarding one’s wealth was dishonourable, and failing to hold lavish feasts regularly through the year at which favoured subject nobles were rewarded by the distribution typically of clothes, horses and cows. The verdict of the poets, who travelled from house to house and feast to feast, was claimed to be an infallible barometer of a noble’s level of generosity, so the poetic class boasted they were qualified judges of the comparative generosity of the nobles of Ireland, and from time to time declared they were awarding the ‘palm of generosity’ (gell einig)158 to the most open-handed host of them all, who was always the man or woman being addressed in the poem at the time.159 From this convention enech commonly came to mean hospitality and liberality. However, for a patron of clients, or a ruler of subjects, a deep cause of shame was to allow outsiders to attack, rob or injure those under the lord’s protection without avenging their wrongs, and if possible recovering the stock robbed from them. The mere fact that a neighbouring lord was so unafraid of the patron’s Maghnusa, ed. Ó Muraíle, p. 17. 154  Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 146–7; Ann. Conn., pp 364–5 (AD1392). See above, p. 132. 155 AU 3, pp 532–3 (AD1519). 156 RIA Dictionary, pp 273– 4, cols 126–33. 157 Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, no. 11, verses 7–8; ABM, poem no. 306, verses 9, 32–4. 158 E.g., David Greene (ed.), Duanaire Mhéig Uidhir (Dublin, 1972), poems no. 1, verses 19, 23; 14, verses 4, 10; 24, verse 3; Lambert McKenna (ed.), The Book of Magauran (Dublin, 1947), poem no. 30, verse 10. 159 O’Sullivan, Hospitality, Chap. 4, esp. pp 117–19; P.A. Breatnach, ‘Moladh na féile: téama i bhfilíocht na scol’, Léachtaí Cholm

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vengeance that he dared to attack his followers in the first place was a deadly insult. The patron’s cheeks were automatically ‘reddened’ with shame, and the shame could only be removed by early retaliation, whether through a legal fine, if the perpetrator could be brought to the courts, or through a counter-raid if he lived across the border in another jurisdiction. Enech in this case meant a scrupulous sensitivity to the dishonour of allowing one’s followers’ wrongs to go unavenged, and a willingness to hazard one’s own life in vindicating the worth of the protection one had claimed to offer them as patron. Enech also meant a readiness to resent any rebellion by one’s own clients or subjects, particularly their turning to another lord as better able to offer the protection they needed for their flocks and herds. This insult to the patron was commonly punished by seizure of the subject’s property, some of it possibly to be returned after his submission, apology and return to his original allegiance. Where two lords were in competition for the allegiance of a subject located on the border between their jurisdictions, the unfortunate victim could find himself alternately plundered by those vying for the title of his ‘protector’.160 The only cure for this situation was for the dominating lord to be so terrifying when avenging wrongs or insults that his neighbours dared not invade his borders, and his subjects could let their cows graze right up to the frontier without fear of molestation, thus appreciably increasing the area of land they could safely turn to profit.161 In spite of the formal and ideological nature of annalistic death-notices, there are signs that they were tailored to suit the characters of individual chieftains. For example the Annals of Ulster described Áed O’Donnell (d.1333) as: The one person that caused most fear and triumph (gráin 7 coscur), general guarantor (feichium coitchenn), the one of best sway and rule (smacht 7 riaghail) that was in the same time as he. while five years later in the same annals Ruaidri Maguire (d.1338) was praised as: ‘the man that most bestowed of money and of goods, of horses and of herds and of cattle.’ The Annals of Connacht in their version of the same entry make it clear that the recipients of this generosity, which included gifts of clothing, were ‘the poets and ollaman of all Ireland’.162 The rather vague phrase feichem coitchenn or ‘general guarantor’, applied above to Áed O’Donnell, could refer to a lord who supported one’s cause in a legal case,163 but in fifteenth-century annals the same Cille, 24 (1994), pp 61–76; idem, Téamaí Taighde Nua-Ghaeilge (Maigh Nuad, 1997), pp 97–129. 160 Examples of alternate raiding by would-be overlords are described in the course of late fifteenth-century competition between O’Donnell and MacWilliam Burke for control of north Connacht – Ann. Conn., pp 542–3, 576–7, 598–9 (AD1468, 1476, 1495). 161 Kelly, Audacht, pp 8–9. 162 AU 2, pp 452–3, 458–61; Ann. Conn., pp 272–3, 280–1 (AD1333, 1338). 163 D.A. Binchy, ‘Fechem, Fethem, Aigne’, Celtica, 11 (1976), 18–33.

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phrase is regularly expanded to ‘general guarantor of poetic bands’ (feichemh coitchenn do cliaraib, or ‘do damaib’).164 Another novel feature of fifteenth-century notices is praise of the chieftain’s academic abilities, his ‘acquaintance with every branch of knowledge’ (aithne ar gach eladhain),165 which would fit in with a wider European pattern of a more literate, better educated lay aristocracy at this period, and with the production of manuscript anthologies containing foreign works of romance, piety or instruction translated into Irish for the benefit of noble patrons.166 Similarly the fifteenth century saw a great increase in praise for chieftains’ ‘almsgiving and humanity’ (derc 7 daenacht) which might perhaps reflect the growing influence of the Observantine Franciscans.167 One of the most comprehensive eulogies of a deceased chieftain is that for Conchobar O’Donnell (d.1342), closely resembling the praise of living rulers found in the bardic poetry, and carrying an implicit warning that the royal qualities most admired by historians and poets were not necessarily those that appealed most to taxpayers, as the poets themselves admit168 from time to time: fitting vessel for the arch-kingship of Ireland (was) he without dispute for shape (ar cruth) and for sense and for intellect (ar céill 7 ar cetfaidh), for highmindedness [or ‘pride’, ar úaill] and for generosity and for preeminence (ar einech 7 ar oirrdercus), for magnanimity [or ‘high spirit’, ar menmnaighi] and for great bestowal (ar mór toirbertaighi), for courage and for battle-vigour (ar crodhacht 7 ar cathirghail), for nobility and for gentleness (ar uaisli 7 ar ailgine), for humanity and good piety (ar daenacht 7 ar deghcrabadh) … and orphaned are wisdom and science without a man to support or to foster them.169 In a masterly survey of a vast array of mostly unpublished bardic poems, Damian McManus has examined the bardic ideal of kingship as manifested in poetic descriptions of the law and order prevailing in the good king’s realm, his bountiful hospitality and the supernaturally good weather and fertility attending his reign. In so doing he demonstrates these themes were rooted in a blend of biblical, classical and pre-Christian Irish teaching and went deeper than a mere desire to flatter a particular patron.170 Historians and poets belonged to medieval 164 E.g., Magnus MacMahon, Áed Buide II O’Neill, Tomás Óc Maguire, Conn O’Neill of Clannaboy, AU 3, pp 150–1, 152–3, 242–3, 278–9 (AD1443, 1444, 1471, 1482). 165 E.g., Donnchad Maguire, Toirdelbach mac Pilib Maguire, AU 3, pp 258–9, 274–5 (AD1476, 1481). 166 Simms, Medieval Gaelic sources, pp 85–8, 100–2. 167 E.g., AU 3, pp 242–3, 248–9 (AD1471, 1473) Tomás Óc and Donnchad mac Áeda Maguire; Ann. Conn., pp 540–1 (AD1468) Cathal Mac Ragnaill. See above, pp 210, 228; below, pp 319–24. 168 See Aithd., poem no. 10, verse 6, ‘Tadhg’s lavishness made Ceallach’s race murmur’ (Méad a chaithmhe gé do chuir . a fhuath fa aicme Chealluigh). 169  AU 2, pp 472–5 (AD1342). 170  Damian McManus, ‘“The smallest man in Ireland can reach the tops of her trees”; images of the king’s peace and bounty in bardic poetry’ in Joseph Falaky Nagy (ed.), Memory and the modern in

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Ireland’s equivalent of a middle class – they were small independent landowners, educated men, and their traditional immunity from violent attack by the nobility gave them some protection if they chose to exercise freedom of speech. Their frequently close relationship to the church as hereditary tenants of church lands,171 and the ceremonial role that some poets or historians occupied as inaugurators to the newly-elected kings172 seems to have inspired them as a class to encourage what they saw as virtue and reprove vice in their rulers. At the same time almost all the literature they have left us was written for patrons, to earn material reward. They did not normally exercise their vaunted power of satire to criticize individuals unless these were persons who had already refused them payment, or from whom they had no hope of payment in the first place.173 When combing the expressed views of bardic poets on kingship in the hope of penetrating to the reality of good or bad rulers that lay behind them, it might be best largely to overlook all that concerns a king’s duty to give generous rewards to ‘men of art’, although when this is expressed in hyberbolic terms it may signal the presence of an ambitious patron who is really paying somewhat over the average to obtain a high public profile.174 Similarly passages that give particularly high praise of a man’s courage in battle may reflect a real quality in the patron,175 as the same words addressed to a notorious coward would smack of satire, but it is also possible that a man of average ability who thought his warlike credentials were somewhat in doubt might encourage his poets to stress the point, as has been suggested in the case of the poem-book for Cúchonnacht Óc Maguire (d.1580).176 If, with these reservations in mind, we examine bardic poems addressed to Ulster kings and potential kings between AD1200 and 1500 for indications as to what poets considered the functions of a king should be, it is no surprise to find that they closely reflect annalistic eulogies. Using the blunt instrument of my previously compiled electronic catalogue of the surviving corpus of bardic poems, a search produced 116 titles of secular poems for which an Ulster provenance between the twelfth and the fifteenth century was indicated. Not all were formal eulogies for male aristocrats, and not all of the latter contained Celtic literatures, CSANA Yearbook 5 (Dublin, 2006), pp 61–117. 171 See below, pp 378, 380–2, 388. 172 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 22–4, 31–2. 173 Liam Breatnach, ‘On satire and the poet’s circuit’ in Cathal G. Ó Háinle and Donald Meek (eds), Unity in diversity: studies in Irish and Scottish Gaelic language, literature and history (Dublin, 2004), pp 25–35; idem, ‘Satire, praise and the early Irish poet’, Ériu, 56 (2006), 63–84; Tomás Ó Cathasaigh, ‘Curse and satire’, Éigse, 21 (1986), 10–15. See also Katharine Simms, ‘Bardic poems of apology and reconciliation’ in Liam Mac Amhlaigh and Brian Ó Corcráin (eds), Ilteangach, Ilseiftiúil: Féilsgríbhinn in ómós do Nicholas Williams: a festschrift in honour of Nicholas Williams (Dublin, 2012), pp 175–91. 174 Katharine Simms, ‘Bardic poetry as a historical source’ in T. Dunne (ed.), The writer as witness, Historical Studies XVI (Cork, 1987), pp 58–75, at pp 64–5. 175 Katharine Simms, ‘Images of warfare in bardic poetry’, Celtica, 21 (1990), 608– 19: 609–10. 176 Greene, Duanaire Mhéig Uidhir, pp vii–ix.

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motifs relating to the function or performance of kings, so the list could be whittled down to 59, a mere 8 from the thirteenth century, 8 from the fourteenth and 43 from the fifteenth century.177 Within this sample the most pervasive themes were eulogies of the king’s gaisced, his warlike prowess, and/or his victorious battle-career (4 out of 8 poems in the thirteenth century, 4 out of 8 in the fourteenth century and 22 out of 43 in the fifteenth century). Equally frequent were allusions to the need to resist military attacks of the English or Anglo-Irish (5 out of 8 thirteenth-century poems, 3 out of 8 in the fourteenth century and 20 out of the 43 fifteenth-century poems). The thirteenth century is a special case, as 7 of the 8 poems involved are attributed to a single author, Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide. He was also the author of religious poems reflecting the influence of the church’s reform movement,178 and he displays an interest in themes that are less frequently mentioned subsequently: the king’s responsibility for maintaining law and order (3 out of 8 poems, compared with 1 out of 8 fourteenth-century poems and 2 out of 43 fifteenth-century poems), and the king’s observance of the church’s immunity to violence in time of war (2 out of 8 thirteenth-century poems, compared to 0 out of 8 in the fourteenth century and 2 out of 43 poems in the fifteenth century). Themes mentioned by Gilla Brigte that continue to interest later poets include vaunting the nobility of the patron’s ancestry, an important theme as it implies his legitimate right to inherit the kingship (3/8, 2/8, 15/43), referring to the land he rules as his wife or lover (2/8, 1/8, 8/43), and to the fair weather and fertility of the land as signalling the justness of his claim to kingship (2/8, 4/8, 12/43). Two of his themes that occur more frequently in subsequent centuries are congratulations to the patron on his success in attracting the admiration of women other than his wife (1/8, 2/8, 5/43)179 and addressing the patron as a future high-king of Ireland (1/8, 4/8, 17/43), a motif that became increasingly widespread when it was obviously unrealistic, occurring in poems for dynasties that had no previous claim to the position politically, such as the O’Reilly chieftains of east Breifne. Motifs that are noticed first in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century poems tend to be linked to the king’s image as a military leader and to the realities of power. These include visions of the gathering of forces of subject chiefs or allies to join the overlord’s hosting (2/8, 2/43), the spartan hardships that the king and his 177  See www.bardic.celt.dias.ie. This total did not however include the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poems to the Mág Shamradáin chieftains of Tellach Echach (north-west county Cavan) whose territory was not regarded as subject to the paramount lordship of Ó Néill in Ulster until the fifteenth century. 178 Below, pp 297, 348–9. 179 The thirteenthcentury poem in which this motif occurs, addressed to Roalb Mac Mathgamna, is somewhat doubtfully attributed to Gilla Brigte due to its presumed late date. Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, pp 182–3, 325 (no. 15 verse 43).

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soldiers must endure while on campaign (2/8, 3/43), the king’s employment of mercenaries in his country’s service (1/8, 4/43), all themes that are also frequently found in the sixteenth-century poems.180 Praise of the king’s ability to exact tribute or cís (1/8, 6/43) and hostages (1/8, 7/43) from lands far and wide is also found, and in the fifteenth century there are references to the king’s officers, such as the máer who collects the tribute (4/43), and to the king’s own role as a sentinel, guarding the borders of his land from enemy attacks (3/43). Two poems, one in the fourteenth century and one in the fifteenth, explicitly refer to the purpose of kingship. In the fourteenth century this is said to be ‘binding’ the kingdom together, that is mediating between the warlike aristocratic families to avoid feuds and civil wars. Significantly this occurs in the poem Bean ar n-aithéirghe Éire which was probably composed to celebrate the end of a succession struggle between Niall Mór O’Neill and his brother Domnall, and the re-integration of the Clann Áeda Buide branch of the dynasty back under the Great O’Neill’s leadership.181 The fifteenth-century poem that refers to the purpose for which kings are ordained is Ní i n-aisgidh fríth flaitheas Néill, ‘Not without paying for it did Niall get his power’, addressed to Niall Garb II O’Donnell, king of Tír Conaill (d.1439).182 In this the king’s role is described as díon an tíre, ‘the protection of the territory’, and interestingly this is explicitly described as his part of a cunnrad, a contract or agreement with his subjects, in return for which they made him king.183 This also seems to be the meaning of an image of kingship found in a poem to Eógan O’Reilly, king of east Breifne (d.1449), in which the king is described as the ‘cowherd’ (buachaill),184 which may have inspired two further uses of the image in poems to his descendant Philip O’Reilly (d.1596).185 Sometimes the expression used is ‘shepherd’ (aoghaire),186 but it is used of particularly warlike kings and prominent military leaders in their service, who are praised for safeguarding the flocks of the territory. The image evoked is not that of a ‘gentle shepherd’ exercising a pastoral care over his subjects, but a ‘cowboy’ guarding their cattle from would-be rustlers. A more hostile viewpoint is expressed by the anonymous Anglo-Irish author of a tract on ‘The State of Ireland’ in 1515:

180 Simms, ‘Images of warfare’. 181 See above, pp 127–9. 182 Aithd., no. 21. 183 Aithd., no. 21, verses 2–5. 184 Aithd., no. 30. 185 James Carney (ed.), Poems on the O’Reillys (Dublin, 1950), nos. 1 verse 33; 13, verse 9; 19, verse 21. 186 See DiD, no. 109, verse 9 (buachaill), verse 22 (aoghaire); Knott, Tadhg Dall, nos. 13, verse 28 (aoghuire); 26, verse 26 (buachaill); Bergin, IBP, no. 8, verse 4 (aodhaire); Seán Mac Airt (ed.), Leabhar Branach, the Book of the O’Byrnes (Dublin, 1944), nos. 19, verse 17; 21, verse 7; 46, verse 13 (aoghaire). See also ABM, nos. 129, verse 14; 92, verse 13; 194, verse 10; 274, verse 18. These last four poems were addressed to major sixteenth-century Ulster leaders, Donnchadh mac Toirdhealbhaigh MacSweeney, Aodh mac Maghnuis O’Donnell, Aodh mac Conconnacht Maguire and Toirdhealbhach Luineach O’Neill.

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Every Iryshe captaine defendeyth all the subgetes, and the comyn folke, wythin his rome [realm], fro ther enemyes, as muche as in hym is; not to thentent that they shulde escape harmeless, but to thentent to devoyre them by hymself, lyke as a gredy hounde delyvereth the shepe fro the wolfe.187 English observers claimed that the ordinary Irish subjects were aware of their rulers’ financial motivations in defending them from outside attack and regarded it as part of the reciprocal bargain between ruler and ruled, citing the proverb ‘Spend me and defend me’, and there are sufficient references in Irish sources to the associated functions of caithem ocus cosnam, ‘spending and defending’, to suggest this was a genuine saying of the time.188 It is a telling symptom of the decentralization and disorder that had ensued after the incomplete conquest of the twelfth century, and the only partially successful Gaelic resurgence of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that the emphasis had switched from justice to protection, with widespread exaction of ‘cíos cosanta’, ‘the tribute of protection’, even from neighbouring territories who feared attack without acknowledging the attacker’s authority.189

187  State papers, Hen. VIII, pt 3, 1, p. 17. 188  Simms, From kings to warlords, p. 112. 189 See above pp 138, 156, 162, 164, 167, 170–1, 176, 178, 197, 222–3.

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CHAPTER

8

The church in medieval Ulster If we are to understand medieval Ulster, it is important to try to understand the minds of the learned classes of hereditary churchmen and poets, because they have supplied the bulk of the written evidence forming the prism through which we have to peer in order to recapture some picture of what society was like at that time. This means beginning with the church. The voice of the native poets was only preserved after the church had first introduced a system for writing down the Irish language using the Latin alphabet, about the middle of the seventh century.1 Besides, while it is true to say that the influence of the poets extended beyond the feasting-halls of their aristocratic patrons, the role of the church was more pervasive still. Outside observers at different periods were to remark on the great reverence both nobles and peasants in Gaelic Ireland exhibited towards the church. At the same time, the non-celibate status of many of the church’s personnel, not all of it in contravention of canon law, integrated church families closely with the general population, through marriage ties and hereditary landholding. T H E P OW E R O F T H E P R E - R E F O R M C H U RC H I N U L S T E R

The northern churches were among the most influential in Ireland for much of the early Middle Ages, the highs and lows in their prestige and status mirroring the fate of their secular patrons. The high status of the Northern Uí Néill was reflected very early in the spread of the Columban family of churches from the homelands of the Uí Néill prince-abbot, St Columba or Colmcille, in Gartan (county Donegal) and Derry, southwards to Durrow in the midlands, and overseas to the island of Iona off the western coast of Scotland, where the saint died in AD597, each site developing daughter-churches in the north of Ireland, the Irish midlands and north Britain respectively.2 (See above, Fig. 5) The early power of the Ulaid under their kings Báetan mac Cairill (reigned 572–81) and Congal Cáech (reigned 627–37) coincided with a high point in the fame of the east Ulster monastery of Bangor (county Down), where St Columbanus (d.615) taught before departing with a group of companions to 1 McCone, Pagan past, pp 23–4; idem, A first Old Irish grammar and reader, including an introduction to Middle Irish (Maynooth, 2005), pp 2–4. 2 Máire Herbert Iona, Kells and Derry: the history and hagiography of the Monastic familia of Columba (Oxford, 1988); Cormac

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found a number of monasteries on the Continent.3 It was allegedly in this early period that Bangor acquired a grant of land from the Uí Bairrche of Leinster at the modern Castledermot, county Carlow, subsequently used by the Ulaid dynast Diarmait ua Áeda Róin as the site for a hermitage in the mid-eighth century during the days of the Culdee Reform.4 As discussed in Chapter 1, the spread of the Cenél nEógain branch of the Northern Uí Néill southwards, at the expense of the mid-Ulster federation of the Airgialla, eclipsed the early predominance of the Columban familia in favour of the church of St Patrick in Armagh, which achieved acknowledged primacy over the whole island under Uí Néill patronage from the seventh century onwards.5 In the mid-twelfth century, St Bernard of Clairvaux gave remarkable testimony to the elevated status of the pre-reform church of Armagh when he wrote: From reverence and honour for [St Patrick], as the apostle of that nation, who had converted the whole country to the faith, that see where he presided in life and rests in death has been held in so great veneration by all from the beginning, that not merely bishops and priests, and those who are clergy, but also all kings and princes are subject to the metropolitan in all obedience, and he himself alone presides over all.6 If this was an exaggerated claim, it would seem to have been based on information St Bernard received from an Irish source, since a Middle Irish legal commentary states that if the king of Ireland were to enter into a contract of clientship, it could only be with the Holy Roman Emperor, or the ‘successor of Patrick’ (comurba Padruid),7 at Armagh. T H E S T RU C T U R E S O F T H E P R E - R E F O R M C H U R C H

On the other hand, in his next sentence, St Bernard showed he was having considerable difficulty in understanding the distribution of authority among the personnel of the pre-reform church in Ireland: Bourke (ed.), Studies in the cult of St Columba (Dublin, 1997). 3 G.S.M. Walker (ed.), Sancti Columbani opera (Dublin, 1957), pp ix–xxxiv; H.B. Clarke and Mary Brennan (eds), Columbanus and Merovingian monasticism (Oxford, 1981). 4 Byrne, Irish kings, pp 124, 145– 6. On Culdees see Peter O’Dwyer, Céli Dé: spiritual reform in Ireland, 750–900 (Dublin, 1981), and below, pp 273–4. The modern place-name Castledermot derives from the medieval Tristledermot, an Anglicization of Dísert Diarmada, ‘Diarmait’s Hermitage’. 5 Charles Doherty, ‘The cult of St Patrick and the politics of Armagh in the seventh century’ in J.-M. Picard (ed.), Ireland and northern France, AD600–850 (Dublin, 1991), pp 53–94; and see above, pp 54, 56–9. 6 H.J. Lawlor, St Bernard of Clairvaux’s Life of St Malachy of Armagh (London and New York, 1920), pp 44–5. St Bernard’s reference to St Patrick being buried in Armagh seems to be linked to a vision of St Malachy to that effect, see ibid., pp 115–16. 7 Simms, ‘The contents of later commentaries’, pp 32–3.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages A very evil custom had developed, by the devilish ambition of certain powerful persons, that the holy see [of Armagh] should be held by hereditary succession. For they suffered none to be bishops but those who were of their own tribe and family … And to such a point had an evil and adulterous generation [Matt. xii, 39] established for itself this distorted right … that although at times clerics failed in that blood, yet bishops never. In a word there had been already eight men before Cellach, married men, and without orders, albeit men of letters.8

A bishop is, by definition, a man in orders, so a lay bishop is an impossibility, but evidently St Bernard had difficulty in imagining a prince of the church who did not at least claim to be a bishop. However, Picard has shown that as early as the seventh century, Irish glossators followed the Church Fathers in pointing to a dichotomy between Aaron, the priest of the Children of Israel, and Moses their leader (princeps in Latin, airchinnech in Old Irish) who used his authority to see that the priests lacked for nothing. For Saint Jerome, and for some HibernoLatin sources, this ‘leader of the church’ was a bishop, but elsewhere an Irish synod considered the same authority as vested in an abbot, and an entry in the Annals of Ulster for AD885 calls the king of Leinster princeps or ruler of the church of Kildare.9 There were thus three kinds of authority within the early Irish church: the authority of a bishop over the ordained clergy, the authority of the abbot, who might or might not have received major clerical orders, over professed monks, and the authority of the church ruler, the airchinnech, over the landed estates with which the church was endowed, over the inhabitants of the church lands, whether these were lay or clerical, and over the rents, tithes and ecclesiastical dues paid to the church from which the clergy were to be maintained, the church buildings kept in repair, hospitality offered to guests and alms to the poor.10 There was no intrinsic necessity for this church ruler to be an ordained cleric, but according to the Vision of Adamnán, a tenth or eleventhcentury Irish text on heaven, hell and purgatory,11 there was a fiery punishment 8 Lawlor, St Bernard of Clairvaux’s Life of St Malachy, p. 45. In a sermon Bernard was even more specific: ‘A tyrannous race laid claim to the metropolitan see of Patrick … creating archbishops in regular succession, and possessing the sanctuary of God by hereditary right’; ibid., p. 148. 9 J.-M. Picard, ‘Princeps and principatus in the early Irish church’ in A.P. Smyth (ed.), Seanchas, pp 146–60, at pp 149–53. See Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster, pp 340–1; T.M. Charles-Edwards (ed.), The Chronicle of Ireland (2 vols, Liverpool, 2006) 1, p. 333 (AD885). 10 Richard Sharpe, ‘Some problems concerning the organization of the church in early medieval Ireland’, Peritia, 3 (1984), 230–70: 258–70; Etchingham, Church organization, pp 49–59; T.M. Charles-Edwards, ‘The pastoral role of the church in the early Irish laws’ in John Blair and Richard Sharpe (eds), Pastoral care before the Parish (Leicester and London, 1992), pp 63–80, at p. 67. 11 Translation and commentary in C.S. Boswell, An Irish precursor of Dante (London, 1908); Irish text in R.I. Best and Osborn Bergin (eds), Lebor na hUidre: Book of the Dun Cow (Dublin, 1929), pp 67–76. Translation in Máire

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reserved for ‘merciless ecclesiastical leaders (airchinnig) who rule over shrines of the saints to gain the donations and tithes of the church, making this treasure their own particular property rather than that of the invited and needy ones of the Lord’.12 The three functions could, of course, be vested in one man. Abbots who also held bishop’s orders were quite common in the early Irish church, and such men would normally also act as ruler of their church settlement, with its community and possessions.13 While no-one could claim to be a bishop unless he had been consecrated, the distinguishing mark of an abbot was his authority over a community of monks, not his having received any particular grade of clerical orders. In Ireland, the situation was further confused by the practice of describing not only ‘real’ monks, who were bound by vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, but even the tenants occupying church lands as manaig, literally ‘monks’. Indeed there are indications that church tenants were expected to follow a stricter mode of life than ordinary Irish laymen, to have only one wife and refrain from sexual intercourse on fast-days, for example, and that they bore the main responsibility for paying those church dues which, in theory, were imposed on the laity at large.14 By the late ninth or tenth century, as CharlesEdwards observes, ‘the term “abbot” might be used of any head of a church served by a community, whether it was strictly monastic or not’.15 In this way, the unordained airchinnig, or ecclesiastical rulers, of Armagh were commonly described as abbots.16 The larger sites, at least, could be expected to include both secular clergy, monks, lay penitents and tenant farmers as part of their communities.17 However, as St Bernard noted, the church in Ireland from the ninth up to the early twelfth centuries shared the abuse of hereditary church office found in many English or Continental churches before the reform movement associated with the name of Pope Gregory VII (d.1085) as the ‘Gregorian’ or ‘Hildebrandine’ reform.18 Herbert and Martin McNamara, Irish Biblical apocrypha: selected texts in translation (Edinburgh, 1989), pp 137–48. 12 Herbert and McNamara, Irish Biblical apocrypha, p. 144; see O’Sullivan, Hospitality, p. 148. 13 Kathleen Hughes, The church in early Irish society (London, 1966), pp 157–8; Etchingham, Church organization, pp 87–8, 100–1; CharlesEdwards, ‘The pastoral role of the church’, p. 67. 14 Hughes, The church in early Irish society, pp 136–42;Etchingham, Church organization, pp 249–54. The varying legal and economic status of different grades of manaig is discussed: ibid., pp 363–454. 15  T.M. CharlesEdwards, ‘Érlam: the patron saint of an Irish church’ in Alan Thacker and Richard Sharpe (eds), Local saints and local churches in the early medieval West (Oxford, 2002), pp 267–82, at p. 273. 16 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster, pp 404, 430, 486, 500, 526 (AD965, 1001, 1049, 1064, 1091); Tomás Ó Fiaich, ‘The church of Armagh under lay control’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 5 (1969), 75–127: 82–90. 17 Charles Doherty, ‘The monastic town in early medieval Ireland’ in Howard B. Clarke and Anngret Simms (eds), The comparative history of urban origins in non-Roman Europe, British Archaeological Reports International series 255 (Oxford, 1985), pp 45–75. 18 Susan Wood, The proprietary church in the medieval West (Oxford, 2006). The Irish situation is discussed on pp 140–7.

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Church lands may, in many cases, have originally formed part of the landed property of the kindred of the founding saint of the particular church in question. At other times, where lands were subsequently donated in honour of the local saint, a branch of the kindred of the former owners may have opted to remain residing on the lands and to become, in effect, tenants or clients of the church. A third possibility involved a donation by a noble patron of land already occupied by serfs, who were bound to remain on the soil, and yield their labour services to the church as their new lord.19 The first two cases produced landowning kindreds who considered themselves to have hereditary rights in the management of their church thereafter. The Irish system of inheritance meant that clerical office could pass as by hereditary right within a single kin-group without any necessary violation of the requirements of celibacy. By and large, lands passed from father to son in Irish customary law, with adjustments in favour of the wider kin-group where there were no sons, or they were underage at their father’s death, but the office of kingship, or the headship of a landowning kin-group, or by extension, hereditary church office, was awarded within the kin-group to the most suitable member,20 and could thus pass from uncle to nephew, or from cousin to cousin, as happened in the case of almost all the early abbots of Iona.21 This principle of the heritability of church office may have resulted in some worldly or corrupt, but not necessarily uneducated church rulers. An early legal maxim made clear that suitability for church office was decided on different grounds from that of secular authority: ‘Seniority for the family, worth for lordship, [Latin] learning for the church (Sinser la fine, febtu la flaith, eccna la heclais)’.22 Even St Bernard had conceded that the Clann Sínaich, the hereditary rulers of the church of Armagh, were ‘men of letters’.23 Cardinal Ó Fiaich has noted that the scholarship that flourished at Armagh under the Clann Sínaich included traditional Irish learning,24 and Kenney has pointed to a multitude of religious tracts and homilies being translated from Latin into Irish during the tenth to twelfth centuries,25 raising the possibility that unordained church rulers, 19 Charles-Edwards, ‘Érlam: the patron saint of an Irish church’, pp 269–72; T.M. CharlesEdwards, ‘The church and settlement’ in Proinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter (eds), Irland und Europa: die Kirche im Frühmittelalter: Ireland and Europe: the early church (Stuttgart, 1984), pp 167–75, at pp 169–75; Etchingham, Church organization, pp 437–8. 20 T.M. Charles-Edwards, Early Irish and Welsh kinship (Oxford, 1993), pp 95–7. See above, pp 234–9. 21 Herbert, Iona, Kells and Derry, pp 37–47. 22 Simms, ‘Changing patterns of regnal succession’, pp 163–4; see Byrne, Irish kings, p. 35, and above, p. 234. 23 ‘absque ordinibus, literati tamen’ (J.P. Migne, Patrologiae: series Latina 182: ‘Sanctus Bernardus Clarae Vallensis Abbas’ (Paris, 1862), p. 1086; J. LeClercq and H.M. Rochais (eds), Sancti Bernardi opera, vol. 3 (Romae, 1963), p. 330. Robert Meyer translates this more negatively, ‘never ordained, but they were at least literate’ (R.T. Meyer trans., Bernard of Clairvaux: the life and death of Saint Malachy the Irishman (Kalamazoo, MN, 1978), p. 38). 24 Ó Fiaich, ‘The church of Armagh under lay control’, pp 111–15. 25 J.F. Kenney, The sources for the early history of Ireland 1: Ecclesiastical (New York, 1929), pp 11, 681–3, 688, 732–3.

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who did not absolutely require Latin because they did not say Mass, were more comfortable acquiring their ecclesiastical learning through the medium of the Irish language.26 As late as the early thirteenth century, there were apparently professed Cistercian monks in Ireland who did not know Latin, and the horrified Bishop Stephen Lexington, when conducting a visitation and reform of this order in Ireland in 1228, was clearly unaware of the extent of Irish translations of scriptural and homiletic material available to such men when he protested: How can anyone love cloister or Writ who knows nothing but Irish?27 … we prohibit you from receiving anyone as a monk unless he knows how to confess his faults in French or Latin. We do not intend with this decree to exclude any people, whether English, Scots, Welsh or Irish, but only persons who are unsuitable for and completely unproductive to the Order. For how can anyone love the Order or observe the seriousness of the silence or the discipline of the cloister who does not know how to find any consolation at all in the Scriptures, or to meditate even a little on the law of God either by day or by night?28 The earliest movement to reform the morals and organization of the church in medieval Ireland did not necessarily require a return to exclusively Latin learning. The documents generated by the reform movement of the Culdees, or Céli Dé (‘clients of God’), were ‘for the most part’ written in Irish rather than Latin.29 Starting in the Munster churches of Dair-inis, Terryglass and Lorrha in the first half of the eighth century, the Céli Dé movement reached its peak with the foundation of ‘the two eyes of Ireland’ – as they were called in the Irish Triads – the two new reformed communities of Finglas and Tallaght (county Dublin), under the saints Dub-littir (d.796) and Máel-Rúain (d.792) respectively. The movement sought a stricter observance of the rule of celibacy, a separation of the church from secular politics, strict Sunday observance, the payment of tithes by the laity in return for more assiduous pastoral care, and for monks the regular celebration of the canonical hours and ascetic practices such as fasting and vigils. Members of this movement, however, did not obey a single leader or develop into a defined monastic order, rather forming regional links of equality among like-minded congregations known as óentada or ‘unities’, a structural weakness which may explain the movement’s lack of long-term success.30 Most commonly, the Céli Dé came to constitute élite groups within the older church 26 Katharine Simms, ‘Literacy and the Irish bards’ in Huw Pryce (ed.), Literacy in medieval Celtic societies (Cambridge, 1998), pp 238–58, at pp 239–41. 27 Barry O’Dwyer (trans.), Stephen of Lexington: letters from Ireland, 1228–1229 (Kalamazoo, MN, 1982), p. 68. 28 O’Dwyer, Stephen of Lexington: letters, p. 91. 29 Etchingham, Church organization, pp 340–62; Hughes, The church in early Irish society, pp 185–93; Peter O’Dwyer, Céli Dé: spiritual reform in Ireland, 750–900 (2nd ed., Dublin, 1981). 30 Hughes, The church in early Irish

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settlements, and it was in this form that they are recorded in Armagh in AD921.31 As a community of clerics who provided a regular round of sung services in the cathedral under the leadership of the ‘Prior of the Culdees’, these Céli Dé in Armagh survived the twelfth-century reform and the Anglo-Norman invasion and, when the dissolution of the monasteries took place under Henry VIII, much of their substantial endowment in lands and impropriated32 parishes was passed on to a Protestant successor institution, the vicars choral of Armagh cathedral. Clones in Monaghan, and Devenish Island and Pubble in Fermanagh, have records of similar continuing communities of Céli Dé in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.33 The ideals of the original movement may have lingered on for some clerics in Armagh as late as the eleventh and twelfth centuries, explaining the ascetic cross-vigils observed by Bishop Áed Ó Forréid (d.1056), and the mystical religious verse of Máel Ísa Ó Brolcháin (d.1086),34 and perhaps inspiring the later reform of St Malachy. The wealth the church received in landed endowments and dues was viewed in Irish customary law as one side of a contract. In return, the church authorities must ensure that the laity, and especially the ecclesiastical tenants or manaig, had access to baptism, confirmation, Sunday Mass and Christian burial. A church with its attached lands lost ecclesiastical status and privileges if the airchinnech refused hospitality, if he abused the immunity from violence ascribed to his sanctuary, or termonn-lands, by allowing them to harbour a den of thieves or a brothel, if the airchinnech was an untonsured layman without correction by a superior abbot or bishop, if no services were held in the church either by the airchinnech himself or ordained clerics employed by him, or if it lay vacant.35 As more and more church communities in the tenth to twelfth centuries were exempted from military service and royal taxation,36 ecclesiastical status became ever more desirable. So an ecclesiastical kin attached to a minor church who could not produce a cleric from among their own members might decide to become subordinate to one of the larger mother-churches, which would be in a position to send clergy out to them, at least for Mass on Sundays. society, pp 181–3. 31 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster, pp 372–3. 32 In a parish where the tithes were impropriated they were assigned to a patron, whether a religious institution or a lord of the manor as income, and the patron was then responsible for appointing and paying a priest to perform the pastoral duties. 33  William Reeves, The Culdees of the British Islands as they appear in history with an appendix of evidences (Dublin, 1864, repr. Felinfach, 1994), pp 11–19, 98–105. 34 Gerard Murphy, ‘A poem in praise of Aodh Ua Foirréidh, bishop of Armagh (1032–1056)’ in Silvester O’Brien (ed.), Measgra i gcuimhne Mhíchíl Uí Chléirigh (Dublin, 1944), pp 140–64; idem (ed.), Early Irish lyrics: eighth to twelfth century (Oxford, 1956), pp 52–8; Muireann Ní Bhrolcháin, Maol Íosa Ó Brolcháin (Maigh Nuad, 1986); eadem, ‘Maol Íosa Ó Brolcháin: his work and family’, Donegal Annual, 38 (1986), 2–19. 35 Charles-Edwards, ‘The church and settlement’, p. 167; CIH, 1, pp 1–3; Anc. Laws Ire., 5, pp 118–31. 36 Hughes, The church in early Irish society, pp 219, 241–2, 263.

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Tírechán, the seventh-century biographer of St Patrick, claimed that many churches in Connacht that had originally been founded by Patrick or his disciples were forced under the ecclesiastical lordship of Clonmacnois in the wake of the ‘most recent plagues’, presumably because they had lost their own ordained clergy through disease.37 Where a local church was subordinate in this way to a mother-church (andóit),38 a hierarchy of claims became recognized in Irish law as governing the right of succession to its headship. If there were a suitable claimant from the founding saint’s own kindred, he would take precedence, if not, then the claim would pass to a candidate from the kindred of the donor of the church’s lands, then to one of the manaig inhabiting the lands, then a candidate sent from the mother-church. Failing that, a candidate from one of the other churches within the same ‘family’ was eligible (i.e., a foundation that was tributary to the same mother-church), and if no one suitable was found among any of these groups, the office should go to a virtuous outsider (deorad) from Armagh.39 The ruler of a mother-church, such as Armagh, was described not only as the ‘head’ (airchinnech, Modern Irish oirchinneach, Anglicé ‘erenagh’, or ‘herenach’) of the church itself, but as the ‘heir’ (comarba, Modern Irish comharba, Anglicé ‘coarb’ or ‘corbe’) of the founding saint, implying that he was successor not just to the saint’s spiritual authority, but to the lands and dues with which his church was endowed.40 Gwynn and Charles-Edwards have noted that the Irish in those days described the Pope both as the airchinnech, ‘head’ or even abb, ‘abbot’ of the church of Rome, and as comarba, ‘heir’ of St Peter.41 Middle Irish commentaries on the Old Irish law tracts envisage a situation where headship of a major church could be vested either in a bishop or in a man who held only minor orders or none at all. A commentary on the Uraicecht Becc, or ‘Small Primer’, states: 37 T.M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2000), pp 251–3; Bieler, The Patrician texts, pp 142–3, 160–1. 38 ‘Another word for church which puts an emphasis on the church’s age is O.Ir. andóit, deriving from antitatem, a contraction of Lat. antiquitatem … a legal glossary is particularly apposite: “andóit, .i. a church which precedes another is head, and it is earlier, .i. the first”’: Richard Sharpe, ‘Churches and communities in early medieval Ireland: towards a pastoral model’ in Blair and Sharpe (eds), Pastoral care before the parish, pp 81–109, at p. 93 and note 35. 39 Liam Breatnach, ‘A verse on succession to ecclesiastical office’ in P.A. Breatnach, Caoimhín Breatnach and Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail (eds), Léann Láimhscríbhinní Lobháin: the Louvain manuscript heritage (Dublin, 2007), pp 32–41; CharlesEdwards, ‘Érlam: the patron saint of an Irish church’, pp 277–8; Etchingham, Church organization, pp 224–32. 40 Kelly, Early Irish law, p. 41; Wood, The proprietary church, p. 143. 41 See MacAirt and MacNiocaill The Annals of Ulster, pp 484–5 (AD1048); Whitley Stokes (ed.), The Tripartite Life of Patrick (2 vols, London, 1887), 1, pp 30–1; Kathleen Mulchrone (ed.), Bethu Phátraic: the Tripartite Life of Patrick, 1 (Dublin, 1939), pp 19–20, ll. 288, 291, 302; Aubrey Gwynn, The Irish church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, ed. G. O’Brien (Dublin, 1992), p. 163; Charles-Edwards, ‘Érlam: the patron saint of an Irish church’, p. 273. The same concept is expressed by Peter Partner in the title of his book The lands of St

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages As regards the church of full honour-price, when a bishop or a fer légind [monastic lector, head of a church school] is its oirchinnech; or when it employs a bishop or fer légind for it from without; there are seven cumals42 of honour-price for its oirchinnech … The apostle’s chair, when a bishop or fer légind is its oirchinnech, or when it employs a bishop or fer légind for it from without, whatsoever person is oirchinnech in it, there are two cumals over twice seven cumals as his honour-price.43

This ‘escape’ clause, ‘when it employs a bishop or fer légind for it from without’, meant that the rank and honour-price of the church head, even one who lacked the most minor of clerical orders (though it seems he may have been tonsured in token of clerical status),44 depended not on the man himself, but on the existing rank of the church he ruled (the highest being Armagh, ‘the apostle’s chair’), as long as he ensured that there were qualified persons on his staff to enable the church’s pastoral and teaching functions to continue. The ruling was not a new invention of the Middle Irish period, it simply repeated the sense of the Old Irish text of the Uraicecht at this point, and the intervening glosses on that text.45 St Bernard was almost certainly justified in attributing motives of greed to the Clann Sínaich, whose members monopolized authority over the wealthy and influential church of Armagh from the late tenth to the early twelfth century, using the title ‘abbot of Armagh’ and comarba or ‘heir’ of St Patrick, although they were unordained, married men. Violence attended the family’s first entry into the office and attempted violence accompanied their reluctant expulsion in favour of St Malachy.46 Peter (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972). 42 Cumal was an Old Irish unit of value, originally signifying a slave-woman, which could be regarded as worth three milch-cows, or 34 to 35 acres of land, although there seems to have been considerable variation in how this was calculated, partly related to the fertility or otherwise of the land in question – see Fergus Kelly, Early Irish farming (Dublin, 1997), pp 574–5, 591–3; Gearóid Mac Niocaill, ‘Tír Cumaile’, Ériu, 22 (1971), 81–6: 84 note 10. 43 Anc. Laws Ire., 5, pp 54–7; ‘In eclais lain, o bias epscop no fear legind ina hoirchendecht, no o focolebus espoc no fer legind cuigi amuig, atait .uii. cumala a neniclainn a hoirchindig … In catair apsdail, o bias espoc no fer legind ina hoircinnect, no a foiclebus espoc no fer legind cuicti amuig, gibe duine uili is oirchindeach innti, atat da cumail for dib .uii.aib cumalaib ina eniclainn’, CIH, 5, p. 1603, ll. 10–13, 23–5. 44 This point depends on how the word foltmaisi, literally ‘hair beauty’ is translated – see Martin Holland, ‘Were early Irish church establishments under lay control?’ in Damian Bracken and Dagmar Ó Riain-Raedel (eds), Ireland and Europe in the twelfth century: reform and renewal (Dublin, 2006), pp 128–42, at pp 134–5. 45 Anc. Laws Ire., 5, pp 54–7; CIH, 2, pp 647:36–648:4; 5, pp 1603:5–10; 6, pp 2269:40–2270:24; pp 2318:24–2319:22. See also commentary on ‘Heptads’, Anc. Laws Ire., 5, pp 126–7; CIH, 1, p. 3:21–3. 46 Ó Fiaich, ‘The church of Armagh’, pp 83, 92, 118–20; Lawlor, St Bernard of Clairvaux’s Life of St Malachy, pp 48–58. See above, pp 51, 76.

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However, a number of modern historians have pointed out that since the unordained ‘abbots’ of Armagh exercised an administrative rather than sacramental office, and did not claim, as St Bernard thought, to be bishops, they were not in breach of canon law, even by being married men.47 Holland has gone further in arguing that, in the Irish church, a man who was ‘unordained’ could still be accorded clerical status if he had received prima tonsura, a simple tonsure without any further clerical orders, not even minor ones such as ‘acolyte’ or ‘psalm-singer’.48 The eminent ninth-century Irish theologian, Johannes Scottus Eriugena, for example, was not ordained into any ecclesiastical grade,49 but had clearly been educated within the church. Similarly, Harrington has noted that when the early twelfth-century reformer Bishop Gilbert of Limerick, in his tract De statu ecclesie, divided God’s people into those who pray, those who plough and those who fight, he included clerics’ wives among those who pray.50 It seems then, the Irish church had never willingly tolerated authority over churches and clergy passing into the hands of actual laymen, but accepted tonsured, but unordained and sometimes married, clerics. This would then explain references to the Clann Sínaich abbots leading their clergy in spiritual exercises such as penitential fasting and prayers for the dead, and the reverence generally accorded to them as spiritual heirs of Patrick and guardians of the Bachall Ísa, the relic known as the ‘Staff of Jesus’, reputed to have been St Patrick’s crosier. Cardinal Ó Fiaich even praises the efficiency with which the church of Armagh continued to carry out its spiritual and pastoral functions under their care.51 An interesting aspect of the Irish situation was that although many such hereditary church rulers originally obtained their position of power because they were related to the local ruling dynasty, as happened on the Continent, yet the suppression of minor royal dynasties by more powerful neighbouring lines in the surrounding lay territory was not inevitably followed by a displacement of hereditary church rulers drawn from the same minor dynasty, since their position was protected by the sacred nature of their office.52 Not only were the ‘heirs’ or ‘coarbs’ (comarbai/comharbadha) of St Patrick drawn from the Clann Sínaich, but the rest of the hereditary officials in that church belonged either to this same kindred or to other branches of the local ruling dynasties of Airthir, 47 Hughes, The church in early Irish society, pp 245–6; Ó Fiaich, ‘The church of Armagh’, pp 98–100; Holland, ‘Were early Irish church establishments under lay control?’ 48 Holland, ‘Were early Irish church establishments under lay control?’ 49 Michael Herren, ‘Ériugena, John Scottus (fl. 848–870)’ in Seán Duffy (ed.), Medieval Ireland: an encyclopedia (New York and Abingdon, 2005), pp 157–59, at p. 157; idem (ed.), Iohannis Scotti Erivgenae Carmina (Dublin, 1993), p. 2. 50 Christina Harrington, Women in the Celtic church: Ireland, 450–1150 (Oxford, 2002), pp 286–9; John Fleming, Gille of Limerick (c.1070–1145) (Dublin, 2001), pp 148–9. 51 Ó Fiaich, ‘The church of Armagh’, pp 96–9. 52 Byrne, Irish kings, pp 118–19, 124–5; Donncha Ó Corráin, ‘Dáil Cais: church and dynasty’ Ériu, 24 (1973), 52–63: 53–7; idem, ‘The early Irish churches: some aspects of organization’ in Donnchadh Ó Corráin (ed.), Irish antiquity (Cork, 1981), 327–41, at pp 328–30.

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or eastern Airgialla, rather than being related to their secular overlords, the Uí Néill of Cenél nEógain.53 The entrenched position of hereditary ecclesiastics was reinforced by the wealth they drew from church dues of one kind or another paid by the surrounding lay population owing allegiance to the particular saint credited with founding their local church,54 and from the landed properties and church tenants that particular saint’s shrine had acquired through past endowments.55 In the case of a mother-church ruling over a number of subordinate church establishments, the princeps of the mother-church received the tribute from these daughter-churches in his capacity as comarba (‘coarb’ or ‘heir’) of the founding saint, and guardian of the saint’s wonder-working relics.56 The pre-eminent position of the abbots of Clann Sínaich, as coarbs of St Patrick, led to their being listed in the Book of Leinster among the territorial rulers of Ireland,57 but they were not the only heads of major churches to exercise political influence, in negotiating and safeguarding treaties among the warring kings of ninth- to twelfth-century Ireland, by authority of the relics of their founder saint.58 This degree of independent status, as against local secular rulers, may be one consideration leading to the composition of poems by clerical authors in the late Middle Irish period in a tone of authoritative exhortation, urging kings to rule justly, punish criminals and, above all, to safeguard the privileges of the church.59 ‘Cert cech ríg co réil’ is a poem in the Book of Leinster ostensibly addressed by the eminent cleric Fothad Canóine to the northern high-king Áed Oirdnide (d.819), but written in language of the tenth to the twelfth century. Internal evidence indicates that it was directed at a king from the Northern Uí Néill, a patron of Armagh, the site of the ‘mausoleum of the kings’,60 whether he was an

53 Ó Fiaich, ‘The church of Armagh’, pp 123–7. 54 Colmán Etchingham, ‘The early Irish church; some observations on pastoral care and dues’, Ériu, 42 (1991), 99–118; idem, Church organization, pp 239–89; Charles-Edwards, ‘The pastoral role of the church’, pp 70–1. 55 Charles-Edwards, ‘The church and settlement’; Etchingham, Church organization, pp 436–54. 56  Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, pp 252–7; Annette Kehnel, Clonmacnois – the church and lands of St Ciarán: change and continuity in an Irish monastic foundation, 6th to 16th century (Münster, 1997), pp 51–2; Ailbhe Mac Shamhráin, Church and polity in pre-Norman Ireland: the case of Glendalough (Maynooth, 1996), pp xvii–xx, 168–72. 57 R.I. Best, Osborn Bergin and M.A. O’Brien (eds), The Book of Leinster, 1 (Dublin, 1954), pp 200–1. 58 Examples of the political influence of the heads of major churches, especially Armagh, can be found in Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster, pp 310, 316, 326, 424, 438, 450, 492, 532, 534, 538, 544, 548, 554, 570, 574 (AD851, 859, 924, 993, 1007, 1015, 1055, 1073, 1097, 1099, 1101, 1102, 1105, 1109, 1113, 1126, 1128). 59 Tadhg O’Donoghue, ‘Advice to a prince’, Ériu, 9 (1921–3), 43–54; idem, ‘Cert cech ríg co réil’ in Osborn Bergin and Carl Marstrander (eds), Miscellany presented to Kuno Meyer (Halle a. S., 1912), pp 258– 77. See Donnchadh Ó Corráin, ‘Nationality and kingship in pre-Norman Ireland’ in T.W. Moody (ed.), Nationality and the pursuit of national independence, Historical Studies XI (Belfast, 1978), pp 1–35, at pp 17–18. 60 Byrne, Irish kings, pp 125, 256.

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O’Neill or a MacLaughlin. The advice given in these sample extracts ranges over taxation, justice, and relations with the church and the poor: The tribute of every king is clearly due to the descendants of noble Niall except three who owe it not … The Patriarch (abb) of great Armagh, the king of Cashel and the king of Tara. Take hostages from all, so that you may be a keen prince, and able to control on every business about which you go Even the brother of a king, whose hostage has been accepted – provided he possesses a dwelling, exempt no man from giving provisions… Do not demand tribute of a man who cannot bear it, better get half from him than that they both should perish. Leave the churches untaxed … do not sue the clergy … Give no false judgements on the bad or the good, but finding the true facts, that is fitting for a prince. Both clergy and laity on land or sea, confine everybody to his own work. Your own confessor (anmchara) whether he be a chaste wise cleric or a laic or one ordained (cid laech cid fer graid), let him have the dispensing of your alms. Esteem the clergy, keep control over their dwellings, protect them against women, good noble son of Niall. Give frequent and generous alms to the church, for which it is right for the sake of Patrick and God, where you will be buried.61 The fact that this poem describes the head of the church at Armagh as an abbot rather than a bishop, and the possibility here envisaged that the king’s confessor or ‘soul-friend’ (anmchara) might be a layman, combined with an emphasis on the need for celibacy among the clergy, suggests that this text was composed in a transitional period early in the church’s reform movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The reference to the king of Tara as separate from an Uí Néill high-king of Ireland would indicate a date subsequent to the death of Máelechlainn II, the last Southern Uí Néill high-king in 1022, after which the title ‘king of Tara’ became a mere courtesy style for the O’Melaghlin provincial kings of Meath.62 The close interplay between the authority of the clerical establishment at Armagh and a northern high-king, as seen in this poem, was also expressed through the soi-disant high-king Domnall MacLaughlin’s donation of a magnificent covering shrine for the ‘Bell of St Patrick’s Will’ 61 O’Donoghue, ‘Cert cech ríg’, pp 261, 263, 265. See Edel Bhreathnach, ‘Perceptions of kingship in early medieval Irish vernacular literature’ in Linda Doran and James Lyttleton (eds), Lordship in medieval Ireland: image and reality (Dublin, 2007), pp 21–46, at pp 26–31; F.J. Byrne, ‘Ireland and her neighbours, c.1014–c.1072’ in NHI 1, pp 862–98, at pp 895–6, where the intended recipient of the poem is identified as Áed mac Néill meic Máelsechlainn, king of Cenél nEógain (d.1068). 62  Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster,

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during the term of office of the eminent but unordained abbot Domnall of the Clann Sínaich, around the last decade of the eleventh century.63 (see Plate VI) The same close interweaving of secular and ecclesiastical power in Ulster survived to the end of the twelfth century, despite the early stages of church reform there, and was manifested both when the Inishowen-based high-king, Muirchertach MacLaughlin, tried to revive the Ireland-wide influence of the Columban familia of churches, with Derry instead of the midland site of Kells as its new centre of authority, and also when John de Courcy fostered the cult of St Patrick in Downpatrick, rivalling the claims of the see of Armagh, which remained outside his reach.64

C O N S E Q U E N C E S O F C H U RC H R E F O R M A N D T H E A N G L O - N O R M A N I N VA S I O N

However, by the early thirteenth century, the church in Ulster was to undergo a fundamental transformation. As a result of the ongoing canon law reform, the Pope, hitherto seen as a remote figure presiding over a court of last appeal, acquired an active role in Irish church affairs, notably in determining succession to the metropolitan archbishopric of Armagh. In a laudable but unsuccessful attempt to rescue the primacy from political controversy, popes in the first half of the thirteenth century tried to impose saintly outsiders – Albrecht Suerbeer of Cologne (1240–7), later apostle of Prussia, and the Italian friar Brother Rainaldo (1247–56) – as archbishops of Armagh, but neither became resident.65 The Pope’s influence over major church appointments was shared by the English king, who claimed to be the ultimate owner of all the lands held by the church in England. There, duly appointed diocesan bishops required royal approval before they could be invested with their temporalities – the church lands and dues from which they received their income – which they then held from the king as his ‘tenants in chief ’, and which reverted to the control of the king’s officials whenever there was a vacancy. From the date of the Second Synod of Cashel (AD1172), the English king was to claim similar rights over the lands of the church in Ireland, although his ability to enforce such claims varied with his political control over different areas. Royal interference in the church affairs of the northern province was to become more tangible after the creation of the earldom of Ulster for Hugh de Lacy the younger in 1205.66 However, right up pp 508–9, 512–13, 522–3, 528–9 (AD1073, 1076, 1087, 1094), etc. 63 P.E. Micheli, ‘The inscriptions on pre-Norman Irish reliquaries’, PRIA, 96C (1996), 1–48: 22–3. See above, Chap. 2, note 21 and Plate VI. 64 See above, pp 79–80, 86. 65 M.T. Flanagan, ‘Hibernopapal relations in the late twelfth century’, Archivium Hibernicum, 34 (1976/7), 55–70; J.A. Watt, The church and the two nations in medieval Ireland (Cambridge, 1970), pp 58, 72, 226– 30; M.H. MacInerny, A history of the Irish Dominicans, I (1224–1307) (Dublin, 1916), pp 84–6. 66 John Watt, The church in medieval Ireland (2nd ed., Dublin, 1998), pp 87–96; idem,

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to the early seventeenth century, the church in Ulster appears to show more continuity with its pre-reform structures than the southern and eastern parts of Ireland, as a result of the more limited scope of the Anglo-Norman conquest and colonization there. The new ecclesiastical structures, which developed in Ireland over the course of the twelfth century, resulted in the shattering of the integrated power of the major pre-reform mother-churches.67 Networks of tributary churches, which once extended across the whole island in the case of St Patrick’s congregation at Armagh,68 or covered much of the midlands in the case of St Ciarán’s Church of Clonmacnoise,69 were now largely split into self-contained territorial dioceses, each under a local bishop. In conformity with the teachings of Bishop Gilbert of Limerick’s treatise on church organization,70 the sphere of the pastoral church, under bishops, priests and deacons, was separated from that of the monks, with the result that the vast landholdings of the old mixed church settlements had to also be divided, some going to maintain the reformed parish and diocesan structures, and some endowing the newly founded houses of Continental monastic orders.71 In areas conquered and settled by the Normans, any remaining pockets of church land not so assigned could be absorbed into the holdings of lay manors, and there are traces of this happening in the Anglo-Norman colony in Antrim and Down.72 The early sixteenth-century miscellany known as the ‘Register of Clogher’ contains a dramatic story about the annexation of the early church site of Donaghmoyne (county Monaghan) by the Pipard baron of Ardee, who began erecting a castle there. He was confronted by Tigernach mac Gilla Ronáin, Bishop of Clogher (d.1218), who came dressed in full pontificals to halt the building, and even physically lay down in the castle ditch:

The church and the two nations, pp 41–6, 54; Brendan Smith, ‘The Armagh–Clogher dispute and the “Mellifont Conspiracy”: diocesan politics and monastic reform in early thirteenthcentury Ireland’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 14:2 (1991), 26–38: 30–3; P.J. Dunning, ‘Irish representatives and Irish ecclesiastical affairs at the Fourth Lateran Council’ in J.A. Watt, J.B. Morrall and F.X. Martin (eds), Medieval studies presented to Aubrey Gwynn SJ (Dublin, 1961), pp 90–113, at pp 92–3. 67 Katharine Simms, ‘Frontiers in the Irish church – regional and cultural’ in T. Barry, R. Frame and K. Simms (eds), Colony and frontier in medieval Ireland (London and Rio Grande, 1995), pp 177–200, at pp 189–95. 68 See Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Brian in Armagh (1005)’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 9 (1978), 35–50: 41–50. 69 Kehnel, Clonmacnois, pp 238–42. 70 Fleming, Gille of Limerick, pp 146–63. 71 Simms, ‘Frontiers in the Irish church’, pp 190–1. 72 In William Reeves, Ecclesiastical antiquities of Down, Connor and Dromore (Dublin, 1847), pp 106, 112, 114, the only references to the presence of erenaghs in these counties in the post-invasion period occur in relation to the uncolonized parts of the diocese of Dromore. See H.A. Jefferies, ‘The diocese of Dromore on the eve of the Tudor reformation’ in Down: Hist. & Soc., pp 123–40, at p. 131. Compare D.F. Gleeson, ‘The coarbs of Killaloe diocese’, JRSAI, 79 (1949), 160–9: 167 on the effect of early Norman colonisation on the former termon lands of Lorrha, Terryglas, Inishceltra and Birr.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages so that the diggers could not work because none of them wished to lay violent hands on the bishop: the baron came himself and with his own hands dragged the bishop from the trench. Crying out against this the bishop cursed the baron so that the baron was stricken with leprosy and afterwards died.

A more dramatic variant of the tale is given some pages further on: the baron seizing a shovel shovelled earth upon him and commenced to bury him alive. But the baron’s knights, seeing this, forcibly pulled the bishop from the ditch lest worse – that is, his death – should befall.73 The castle however was completed, and in later years passed into the possession of the English king.74 In the areas of Ireland where Gaelic rulers were not displaced, unassigned church lands remained in the hands of their hereditary occupants. The chronicler Gerald of Wales, or Giraldus Cambrensis, in the second and third ‘editions’ of his celebrated ‘Topography of Ireland’, has an interesting description of the semi-clerical status of the hereditary tenants on these unassigned church lands. He was writing some time after 1185, a period subsequent to the completion of the diocesan reform, but before the new parish organization was fully in place: The men who enjoy ecclesiastical immunity, and are called ‘ecclesiastical men’, although they be laics, and have wives, and wear long hair hanging down below their shoulders, but only do not bear arms, wear for their protection, by authority of the Pope, amplas in capite coronas [broad tonsures on the head],75 as a mark of distinction.76 Ulster tradition, as recounted by Cavan jurors during inquisitions taken in the early seventeenth century, plausibly stated that the hereditary occupants of unassigned church lands were initially taxed as ordinary lay subjects by the 73 Nicholls, ‘The register of Clogher’, 384, 386–7, 389, 404–5. 74 Otway-Ruthven, Med. Ire., pp 212, 272. 75 This phrase was translated by Wright as ‘fillets on the crown of their heads’, but my alternative rendering (in square brackets) follows common medieval usage in ecclesiastical contexts: see J.F. Niermeyer and C. Van de Kieft (eds), Mediae Latinitatis lexicon minus, revised J.W.J. Burgers (2 vols, Leiden, 2002), p. 360. 76  ‘Verumtamen viri qui ecclesiastica gaudent immunitate, et quos viros ecclesiasticos vocant, quanquam laici et uxorati, comis quoque perlongis transhumerum diffusis, solum armis renuntiantes, in signum protectionis pontificali impositione amplas in capite coronas habent’: J.F. Dimock (ed.), Giraldi Cambrensis opera 5: Topographia Hibernica et expugnatio Hibernica (London, 1867), p. 171; translation adapted from Thomas Wright, The historical works of Giraldus Cambrensis (London, 1863), pp 140–1. This passage on the ‘ecclesiastical men’ does not appear in the first

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Gaelic chieftains, in the wake of the canon law reform and, to avoid these burdens, they subsequently came to an agreement with the diocesan bishops to hold their lands under church authority, rendering dues to the bishops as vassals of the church.77 In Connacht (the ecclesiastical province of Tuam), this agreement between the hereditary rulers of church lands, the ‘coarbs’ and ‘erenaghs’, on the one side and the diocesan bishops on the other, took place in 1210, when the Annals of Clonmacnoise record: There was a great convocation of the clergy of Connaught before the bushopp of Twayme, to make constitutions, for the taking away the Termine lands78 or Cowarb lands, and annexing them to the bushoppricks of the diocess where they lay.79 There is some reason to think that the comparable arrangements later found in the province of Armagh were developed around the same period.80 A rather similar sequence of decisions was re-enacted in the early seventeenth century, immediately after the political authority of the Gaelic chieftainships there had been abolished, and preparations were being made to carry out King James I’s scheme to plant six of the nine counties of Ulster (excluding Antrim, Down and Monaghan) with English and Scots colonists. Initially the unassigned church lands were claimed as the property of the king himself, who was ‘head of the church’ under the Protestant dispensation, and it was only after strong protest by the Church of Ireland bishops that they were recognized as the immediate owners (under the king) of all church lands in their dioceses, entitled to rent and dues from the hereditary tenants who occupied them.81 Because of the initial belief that the king’s own financial rights were involved, the various surveys of Ulster taken in preparation for the 1610 plantation enquired minutely into the status of all the church lands of the province, while the bishops carried out their own inquisitions and surveys to establish their historical rights.82 As a recension of Giraldus’ Topographia, ed. J.J. O’Meara, but Dimock, op. cit., pp xxiv–xxv, considers it as definite that the additions found in the ‘second and third editions’ of the text came from the pen of Giraldus himself. 77 Inquisitionum in officio rotulorum cancellarie Hiberniae … repertorium, vol. 2, ‘Ultonia’ (Dublin, 1829): Appendix vii: ‘Cavan’, col. 8, also Appendix iii: ‘Colerane’ col. 6; see Reeves, Ecclesiastical antiquities, p. 145. 78 Otherwise ‘termon lands’ from the Old Irish termonn, Early Modern Irish tearmann, signifying ‘the lands of a church or monastic settlement within which rights of sanctuary prevailed’, derived from the Latin word terminus, ‘a boundary’. See RIA Dictionary, p. 588. 79 Ann. Clonm., p. 224. 80 Simms, ‘Frontiers in the Irish church’, pp 186–8. 81 Brian Mac Cuarta, Catholic revival in the north of Ireland, 1603–41 (Dublin, 2007), p. 23. 82 See H.A. Jefferies, ‘Derry diocese on the eve of the plantation’ in Derry Hist. & Soc., pp 175–204; idem, ‘Erenaghs in preplantation Ulster: an early seventeenth-century account’, Archivium Hibernicum, 53 (1999), 16–19; idem, ‘Erenaghs and termonlands: another early seventeenth-century account’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 19:1 (2002), 55–8; Inquisitionum, 2, ‘Ultonia’: Appendices, passim; IMC,

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result we know far more about the ‘termon men’ (tearmannaigh) or tenants of unassigned church lands which had formerly been part of the termonn, or ‘sanctuary lands’ of various early Christian church sites, in Ulster than in any other part of Ireland. In addition, thanks largely to the antiquarian and scholarly interests of the seventeenth-century Archbishop James Ussher,83 Armagh is the only Irish diocese for which a long series of medieval and early modern archiepiscopal registers have been preserved, ranging from that of Milo Sweteman (d.1380) to George Dowdall (d.1558). These exceptional circumstances mean that, while we have a lot of information about the medieval church in Ulster, it is less easy to judge how typical practices in this province were of life in the Irish church as a whole. For example, ecclesiastical historians often see the medieval Irish church in general as divided along ethnic lines, between the church ‘among the Irish’ (inter Hibernicos) and the church ‘among the English’ (inter Anglicos), but this phrase is only consistently recorded in relation to the diocese of Armagh. In this case there was a clear administrative division between the colonized county of Louth in the south, under the care of an archdeacon, and the northern part, still ruled by Irish chieftains, which was administered by the dean and chapter of Armagh and the ‘Principal Officials’ of the rural deaneries of ‘Tullahogue’, and ‘Erthyr with the city of Armagh’.84 From the mid-fourteenth century, when the record of the Armagh registers begins, it is clear that the whole northern province is divided into territorial dioceses, and sub-divided into parishes, these parishes being grouped for administrative convenience into larger units known as ‘rural deaneries’. The areas allotted to these rural deaneries can usually be associated with contemporary political divisions, for example, the rural deanery of Lough Erne reflected the medieval kingdom of Fir Manach (Fermanagh), and the rural deanery of ‘Orior with Armagh’ included the O’Hanlon lordship of Orior or Airthir.85 Parishes in areas still under the rule of Gaelic chieftains were normally larger in size than those in the colonized areas, and were centred on early Christian church foundations.86 All but the poorest parishes were staffed by both a rector and a vicar, while sometimes vicars, in their turn, paid a chaplain to take services on their behalf, and all of these clergy were ordained priests.87 An ‘MS Rawlinson A 237, the Bodleian Library, Oxford’, Anal. Hib., 3 (Dublin, 1931), 151–218. 83 Quigley & Roberts, Reg. Mey, pp ix–xxi. 84 See H.A. Jefferies, Priests and prelates of Armagh in the age of the reformations, 1518–1558 (Dublin, 1997), especially Chap. 3; J.A. Watt, ‘Ecclesia inter Anglicos et inter Hibernicos: confrontation and coexistence in the medieval diocese and province of Armagh’ in James Lydon (ed.), The English in medieval Ireland (Dublin, 1984), pp 46–64, at pp 48, 57. 85 H.A. Jefferies, ‘Papal letters and Irish clergy: Clogher before the Reformation’ in H.A. Jefferies (ed.), History of the diocese of Clogher (Dublin, 2005), pp 81– 107, at p. 102; idem, Priests and prelates, p. 70. 86 Jefferies, Priests and prelates, pp 64–6. 87 Jefferies, ‘The diocese of Dromore’, p. 125; idem, Priests and prelates, p. 69; idem, ‘Derry diocese’, p. 184; idem, ‘Papal letters’, p. 98.

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interesting point is that while in areas of English colonization the lay lord of the manor frequently exercised the right of ‘presentation’, or appointment of the local parish priest, in the areas still under Gaelic rule this right was almost invariably in the hands of clerics, normally the diocesan bishop himself, but also deans or other cathedral officers, or monastic houses, where the tithes of a particular parish had been ‘impropriated’, or assigned to them as part of their income.88 In every diocese there was a consistory court to enforce the rules of canon law for clergy and laity, with subordinate church courts being held in at least some of the rural deaneries.89 A great transformation had indeed taken place in the organization of the church in Ulster, but the changes were not as radical as might appear at first sight. Sharpe has argued that, in pre-reform days, early medieval Ireland was already peppered with a multitude of churches, and for those churches to maintain their legal standing, they were required to have an ordained cleric celebrating Mass there on Sundays, so that the pastoral needs of the laity had not been as neglected as has sometimes been suggested, although Etchingham saw Sharpe’s view as unduly optimistic, and suggested that, in the context of ‘a scarcity of clergy’, regular pastoral ministration was largely confined to the manaig, or occupants of church lands, in the early medieval period.90 Moreover, it would seem that, after the reform period, the displaced hereditary rulers of the church had driven a hard bargain, at any rate in Ulster. Jefferies, in a series of studies on the church in late medieval and early modern Ulster, has pointed out that the amount of land assigned as ‘glebe land’ to support the parish priest, whether vicar, or rector in parishes where there was no vicar, was small, and that even when the revenues from parochial tithes were included, the average income of both rectors and vicars was very low.91 In the Fermanagh area of Clogher diocese (the rural deanery of Lough Erne), Sir John Davies noted in 1607: The Church land was either monastery land, corbe land or herinachs’ land; for it did not appear to us the Bishop had any land in demesne, but certain mensall duties of the corbes and herinachs; neither did we find the parsons and vicars had any glebe land at all in this country.92 Elsewhere in Ulster, apart from the meagre glebe-lands, and estates specifically granted to post-reform monastic houses, the remainder of the church 88 Jefferies, ‘The diocese of Dromore’, p. 135; idem, ‘Derry diocese’, p. 177; idem, Priests and prelates, pp 67, 71, 78; idem, ‘Papal letters’, p. 98. 89 Jefferies, ‘Derry diocese’, p. 177; idem, ‘The church courts of Armagh on the eve of the Reformation’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 15 (1993), 1–38. 90 Sharpe, ‘Churches and communities’; Etchingham, Church organization, pp 252–8. 91 Jefferies, Priests and prelates, pp 68–73; idem, ‘The diocese of Dromore’, pp 124–5; idem, ‘Derry diocese’, pp 184–6. 92 Found in Morley, Ire. under Eliz. & Jas I,

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land in each parish was held by the traditional church tenants, under the leadership of one or more ‘erenaghs’ (airchinnig, oirchinnigh), this title no longer signifying princeps or ruler of the church establishment as in pre-reform days, but merely ruler of the church tenants. These paid the diocesan bishop a moderate annual rent for the lands they and their kinsmen occupied, with the more valuable service of hospitality for the bishop himself, and his retinue, when he came on visitation to the parish in question. In counties Derry, Donegal and Tyrone, and in the diocese of Clogher (counties Fermanagh and Monaghan), the erenaghs were responsible for maintaining up to two-thirds of the fabric of the local church at their own expense and, in Derry diocese, it was the erenagh who collected the bishop’s third of the parochial tithes, together with death duties and a share of marriage dowries, though the bishop paid him a certain sum for his trouble.93 As we have seen, the commentaries on the Old Irish law tracts insisted that, for an erenagh to retain the full honour-price due to the head of the church over which he presided, he must at least become tonsured, accept the authority of the local bishop or abbot, and ensure the continuance of services in his church. In Ulster to the end of the sixteenth century, Jefferies has argued, if these preconditions were fulfilled: the bishop could not remove [erenaghs] from their lands without an extraordinarily good reason. On the death of an erenagh the clan had the right to elect his successor from among themselves. The bishop could veto the clan’s choice if he had sufficient reason for doing so, but he was obliged to appoint the next erenagh from the clan.94 In the late fifteenth century, Pope Alexander VI had ruled on a test case from the Munster province of Cashel, treating the O’Donnegan (Ó Donnagáin) coarb of Kilmeen, county Cork, as a feudal vassal of the bishop, that is, as a tenant with a family right of inheritance in return for certain services. He upheld the local custom of appointing the eldest family member, if otherwise suitable, to succeed to the coarbship of the church and the headship of his family, in this case confirming their choice of the deceased coarb’s brother, who was a canon of Ross cathedral, in preference to the bishop’s appointment of the deceased coarb’s teenage son.95 The almost inevitable consequence of the preponderance of the landed wealth of the church in Ulster remaining in the hands of the hereditary church tenants was that the majority of the ordained clergy in the province were recruited from p. 364. 93 Jefferies, ‘The diocese of Dromore’, pp 131–2; Jefferies, ‘Derry diocese’, pp 179– 81, 183, 185; Jefferies, ‘Papal letters’, pp 95, 99; Brian Bonner, ‘Ó Muirgheasáin: the bishop’s tax-gatherer’, Donegal Annual, 43 (1991), 117–21. 94 Jefferies, ‘Derry diocese’, p. 181. 95 A.P. Fuller (ed.), Calendar of papal letters relating to Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 16,

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erenagh families.96 In some cases, the rector or vicar of a parish was also the erenagh, significantly improving the incumbent’s income;97 in other cases, ordained family members, sharing the same surname as the erenagh of a particular parish, held the offices of rector or vicar either in the same parish, or in some other part of the diocese. Ecclesiastical learning, as we have seen,98 was a theoretical qualification for the financially rewarding office of erenagh, or chief of a kin-group of church tenants, and this may have served to stimulate more than one member of such a family in each generation to study for the church. However, an unordained erenaghy no longer formed the highest prize in store for the best Latin scholar among such a group of related students. While the incomes of parish priests were meagre, each bishop, who received rents and dues from all the erenaghs in his diocese, commanded ‘sufficient means to maintayne ye Bishop lordlyke’.99 Moreover, in every parish where there was both a rector and a vicar, the vicar bore the pastoral responsibility, known as the ‘cure of souls’, making the office of rector in practice a sinecure, that is, an ecclesiastical office that could be combined with other duties without danger of neglecting the care of the souls of his parishioners. Rectors, therefore, could also serve as cathedral canon, as chancellor of the diocese or as rural dean, or simply hold more than one rectory at a time, enhancing their income in each case, without violating canon law. Those clerics best qualified in canon law could act as ecclesiastical judges in the consistory courts of the diocese, or in the ruri-decanal courts at local level, or be deputed by the pope to try particular cases in which a church office was claimed by more than one candidate.100 Consequently, erenagh families with the resources to educate their clerical members to a high level gained considerable influence within their own diocese, and might even acquire additional erenachies in other parishes, in cases where a local family of church tenants had died out. Of the four most prominent clerical families in the later medieval diocese of Armagh – the O’Lougherans (Uí Lúchairéin), MacCawells (Meic Cathmail), O’Connellans (Uí Chonnalláin) and O’Culeans (Uí Chuiléin) – three of them can be shown to be erenagh families, and the fourth, the O’Connellans, were probably one also.101 This background of clerical families and clerical wives seems to have led to numbers of ordained clergy retaining their wives after receiving major orders, something that only became a seriously divisive issue in the fifteenth century, during the fresh impulse towards reform associated with the Observantine friars.102 Alexander VI, pt 1 (Dublin, IMC, 1986), pp 308–9. 96 Jefferies, Priests and prelates, pp 74–5; idem, ‘The diocese of Dromore’, pp 127–9; idem, ‘Derry diocese’, pp 181–2, 188–9, 191–2; idem, ‘Papal letters’, 99–100. 97 Jefferies, Priests and prelates, p. 75; idem, ‘The diocese of Dromore’, p. 132, idem, ‘Derry diocese’, p. 181. 98  Above, pp 272–3. 99  Jefferies, ‘Erenaghs and termonlands’, p. 58. 100  Jefferies, ‘The church courts of Armagh’. 101 Jefferies, Priests and prelates, p. 74; Simms, ‘Frontiers in the Irish church’, pp 181–2. 102 Jefferies, Priests and prelates, pp 79–80; Jefferies, ‘Derry diocese’, p. 191; Jefferies, ‘Papal

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In the early seventeenth century, in the context of the pending plantation of Ulster, there was a continuing difference of opinion between bishops and erenaghs as to their precise relationship. The erenaghs maintained that they and their families were in hereditary possession of the church lands, as freeholders who merely paid the bishop tribute and service, in acknowledgment of his lordship over them,103 while the bishops saw themselves as owners of all the church lands in their diocese, with the erenaghs and their kinsmen being simple tenants. This was not an attitude confined to English newcomers, but was vigorously argued by the learned Protestant archbishop of Tuam, Uilliam Ó Domnaill, who had been working with traditionally educated bardic poets and historians in the translation of the New Testament into Irish (1602) while he, himself, translated the Book of Common Prayer (1608).104 In their own eyes, and in the estimation of the surrounding laity, it appears the erenaghs were still viewed as unordained clerics. This is stated in a summary of the position relayed by Oliver St John in 1610: It is affirmed that the Herenaghes are in accompt as Clergiemen, and do for the most part of them speake Lattin, and they say that auncientlye they used to have primam tonsuram, yett neverthelesse they affirme that they allwayes used to marry.105 It was usually these erenaghs who retained guardianship of the founding saints’ bells or other relics, and used them to validate oaths and contracts among the neighbouring population or to curse individuals perceived as ‘enemies of the church’.106 Exceptionally, St Malachy (d.1148), the reformed archbishop of Armagh, had purchased from Clann Sínaich the Bachall Ísa, ‘the staff covered with gold and adorned with most costly gems, which they call the Staff of Jesus’, venerated as the crosier of St Patrick.107 This seems to have been an important factor in ensuring that his successors, as archbishops of Armagh and primates letters’, pp 100–1, 104. See below, pp 319–21, 324. 103 Inquisitionum, 2, ‘Ultonia’: Appendix vii: ‘Cavan’, col. 8; Michael Glancy, ‘The church lands of county Armagh: text of the Inquisition of 1609 with introduction and notes’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 1:1 (1954), 67–100: 73–4, 77–80. 104 Jefferies, ‘Erenaghs and termonlands’. See N.J.A. Williams, I bPrionta I Leabhar: na Protastúnaigh agus Prós na Gaeilge, 1567–1724 (Baile Átha Cliath, 1986), pp 27– 42; Ruairi Ó hAodha, ‘Poetry, prophecy and the printing-press: William Daniel and the reformation in Tuam’ in Katharine Simms (ed.), Gaelic Ireland (c.600–c.1700): politics, culture and landscapes (Dublin, 2013), pp 56–63. 105 Jefferies, ‘Erenaghs in pre-plantation Ulster’, p. 17. 106 Jefferies, Priests and prelates, p. 60; Jefferies, ‘Derry diocese’, pp 181–2; Smith, Reg. Swetemen, pp 147–8; Pádraig Ó Gallachair, ‘Coarbs and erenaghs of county Donegal’, Donegal Annual, 4:3 (1960), 272–81: 275, 277, 279; B. O’Daly, ‘St Damhnat and St Dimpna’, Clogher Record, 2:3 (1959), 415–31: 424. See also Katharine Simms, ‘O’Friel’s ghost’ in John Carey, Kevin Murray and Caitriona Ó Dochartaigh (eds), Sacred histories: a festschrift for Maire Herbert (Dublin, 2015), pp 401–8. 107 Lawlor, St Bernard of Clairvaux’s Life of St Malachy, pp 53–4.

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of all Ireland, were accepted in Gaelic tradition as true coarbs or ‘heirs’ of St Patrick, even after the monopolization of the primacy by English or Anglo-Irish appointees in the later Middle Ages.108 Not all diocesan bishops could claim this ancient prestige. For example, in Derry the mantle of ‘coarb of Columba’ passed to the abbot of the Augustinian canons in the Black Cell in Derry, who was not only endowed with extensive church lands in Inishowen, but had his own erenaghs to collect his dues there,109 this high status no doubt being traceable to the vigorous sponsorship of the Inishowen-based high-king Muirchertach MacLaughlin during the twelfth-century reform period.110 In the case of other pre-reform mother-churches, which had not become either a monastery or a diocesan see in the high Middle Ages, the coarb might be viewed as a plebanus, a rector in a major parish with oversight of a number of subordinate churches or chapels attached to the mother-church, or simply as a kind of ‘super erenagh’, a married ecclesiastic who was unordained or in minor orders only, and who was effectively a steward of the relics and church lands attached to his foundation, paying dues to his diocesan bishop.111 Examples of the latter type were the coarb of St M’Áedóc of Drumlane in Cavan,112 and the coarb of St Caillín of Fenagh in Leitrim, of whom his historian wrote in 1516: A prayer here for happiness and prosperity to Tadhg O Rodaighe (and to his wife Honora, daughter of O Molloy) i.e., the Coarb of Caillin of Fenagh; a man full of wisdom, and knowledge, and learning and jurisprudence; a reader of the Scotic; and a man who composes seghda and oglachus;113 and a man who observes the privileges and prohibitions of the place in which he is, to wit, that he should keep a house of general hospitality, and not deny the face of man, but be like an immoveable rock in humanity for ever.114 The late medieval or early modern Lives of St Caillín of Fenagh, St M’Áedóc of Ferns and Drumlane, and St Molaisse of Devenish Island in Lough Erne are mixed prose and verse compositions in Irish, representing expanded versions of eleventh- or twelfth-century Irish texts (themselves often versions of earlier 108 E.g., AU 2, pp 248–9; 3, pp 184–5 (AD1207, 1455); John Barry, ‘The coarb and the twelfth-century reform’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 88 (1957), 17–25: 17; St J.D. Seymour, ‘The coarb in the medieval Irish church’, PRIA, 41C (1933), 219–31: 228. 109 Inquisitionum, ‘Ultonia’, Appendix IV, ‘Derrie’, col. 1. 110 See above, pp 79–80. 111 Seymour, ‘The coarb’. 112 Seymour, ‘The coarb’, 225. Seymour argues (ibid., 222) that the coarbship of Clones in Monaghan became effectively a rectory which served as a prebend for successive canons of Clogher cathedral, but Jefferies, ‘Papal letters’, p. 99, considered it another of the purely administrative coarbships, like Fenagh. Seymour’s evidence seems drawn from a somewhat earlier period, late fourteenth to mid-fifteenth century, which may possibly explain the divergence. 113 These are simple types of bardic verse, see below, p. 355. 114 Bk Fen., pp 235–7, 311.

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Latin saints’ Lives). They served nostalgically to recall the power of the prereform coarbs as heirs to the spiritual authority of the saints, and to threaten the local populations with hell and damnation if they failed to pay their burial dues or other offerings to their patron saint, or if they invaded or plundered the church’s termann or sanctuary lands.115 R E S I S TA N C E T O R E F O R M

Two factors slowed the pace of change for the church in Ulster. One was the limited penetration of Anglo-Norman colonization into the province. Mid- and western Ulster together with Breifne and Angaile (the modern counties of Leitrim, Cavan and Longford) formed the largest continuous area under Gaelic rule in later medieval Ireland, sometimes known as ‘magna Irecheria’, ‘the great Irishry’. It was not so much that the colonists were more pious or generous to the church. In many cases the multitude of new monastic foundations they established with links to mother-houses in Britain and France cost them little or nothing, in the sense that they were being endowed with existing church lands from pre-reform Ireland, while at other times the barons simply annexed church lands into their own secular manors, as in the case of Donaghmoyne and the Pipard barons of Ardee.116 By so doing, however, the Anglo-Normans had removed the vested interest of hereditary church tenants from the colonized areas, thereby smoothing the way for the new diocesan and parochial system to take control. The chieftains in areas of Gaelic rule were accustomed to reverence the unordained erenaghs as clerics, and were reluctant to incur their wrath and maledictions. Left undisturbed, the erenaghs gradually blended with the diocesan system, educating their sons in canon law and theology, and seeing them rise to high positions within the new church structures, but change was slow and incomplete. The relatively stable compromise between the unordained, hereditary churchmen and the new diocesan and parochial structures, that we can see operating from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, was not constructed overnight, and was not introduced without opposition. The most intense resistance to reform occurred in the thirteenth-century diocese of Raphoe, the kingdom of Cenél Conaill (Donegal). This location has a peculiar 115 See Charles Doherty, ‘The transmission of the cult of Maedhóg’ in Proinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter (eds), Ireland and Europe in the early Middle Ages: texts and transmission (Dublin, 2002), pp 268–83; Raymond Gillespie, ‘A sixteenth-century saint’s life: the second Irish Life of St Maedoc’, Breifne, 10:40 (2004), 147–54; idem, ‘Relics, reliquaries and hagiography in south Ulster, 1450–1550’ in Rachel Moss, Colmán Ó Clabaigh and Salvador Ryan (eds), Art and devotion in late medieval Ireland (Dublin, 2006), pp 184–201; Walsh, Ir. men of learning, pp 49–73. 116 Above, pp 281–2.

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interest, because it was the area named by the twelfth-century chronicler Gerald of Wales as the scene of an exceptional and bizarre rite of royal inauguration: There is in the northern and farther part of Ulster, namely in Kenelcunill, a certain people which is accustomed to appoint its king with a rite altogether outlandish and abominable. When the whole people of that land has been gathered together in one place, a white mare is brought forward into the middle of the assembly. He who is to be inaugurated, not as a chief, but as a beast, not as king, but as an outlaw, has bestial intercourse with her before all,117 professing himself to be a beast also. The mare is then killed immediately, cut up in pieces, and boiled in water. A bath is prepared for the man afterwards in the same water. He sits in the bath surrounded by all his people, and all, he and they, eat of the meat of the mare which is brought to them. He quaffs and drinks of the broth in which he is bathed, not in any cup, or using his hand, but just dipping his mouth into it round about him. When this unrighteous rite has been carried out, his kingship and dominion has been conferred.118 (See Figs. 21 and 22) Gerald’s account has naturally aroused much controversy among historians down the ages, with the seventeenth-century scholars Geoffrey Keating and John Lynch accusing him of lying outright.119 However, his description finds parallels in an early Indian rite of kingship about which Gerald could not possibly have been informed.120 Moreover, it is noticeable that medieval accounts of less bizarre inaugurations in the northern half of Ireland contain a variety of references to the presence of a horse (an ordinary riding horse), or even the royal candidate crouching like a horse, or being approached by an inaugurator wielding a horsewhip,121 while early Irish literature has some suggestive ‘man in a cauldron’ allusions.122 It is now generally acknowledged that what we have from Gerald of Wales is an admittedly hostile description of a genuinely archaic Indo-European ritual of kingship,123 and the remaining question is only whether Gerald’s information related to a living custom found in twelfth-century Tír Conaill, an area he had never visited personally, or whether he was drawing on some antiquarian or saga material. 117 ‘coram omnibus bestialiter accedens’, literally ‘approaching as a beast in the sight of all’ – Dimock, Giraldi Cambrensis opera 5 (Dist. III, cap. xxv), p. 169; O’Meara, ‘Giraldus Cambrensis in topographia’, p. 168. O’Meara’s translation has the effect of turning Gerald’s insinuation into a statement. 118 O’Meara, Gerald of Wales, p. 110. 119 John O’Donovan (ed.), The genealogies, tribes and customs of Hy-Fiachrach (Dublin, 1844), pp 426–37; Foras Feasa, 1, pp 20–5. 120 Jan Puhvel, ‘Aspects of equine functionality’ in Jan Puhvel (ed.), Myth and law among the Indo-Europeans (Berkeley, CA, 1970), pp 159–72; F.R. Schröder, ‘Ein altirischer Krönungsritus und das indogermanische Rossopfer’, ZCP, 16 (1926/7), 310–12. 121 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 22–4. 122 Byrne, Irish kings, pp 17–18. 123 Charles Doherty, ‘Kingship in early Ireland’ in Bhreathnach, Tara, pp 3–31, at pp 17–19, 23–24.

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Fig. 21 Slaying white mare as part of inauguration rite. From Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, NLI MS 700, f. 39v, image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Nowhere in this account does Gerald indicate that he sees this as a pagan ritual honouring some non-Christian deity. For him, it is simply a disgusting custom, though elsewhere he refers to some sailors meeting islanders off the coast of Connacht who had ‘heard nothing of Christ and knew nothing about him’.124 Tír Conaill, the home of St Columba or Colmcille, was hardly likely to harbour actual ignorance of Christianity in the twelfth century. Between 1167 and 1197, during the time Gerald wrote, the king of Tír Conaill was Flaithbertach Ó Máeldoraid (Dorrian), who had indicated his support for church reform by founding the Cistercian monastery of Assaroe.125 His rival for the kingship, Ruaidri Ó Canannáin (O’Cannon), also relied on the church. In 1188, he took refuge in the Columban foundation of Drumcliff (north Sligo), and was then enticed out of his sanctuary by Flaithbertach Ó Máeldoraid, so that he could be killed without sacrilege.126 Furthermore, Gerald of Wales does not allege that the king in question was ruler of all Tír Conaill, rather he speaks of a certain people within that kingdom. There are scattered hints that the strange rite he describes may have been associated with the third royal line in Tír Conaill, the O’Donnell chieftains of Cenél Luigdech, an area in north Donegal approximating to the barony of Kilmacrenan, who did not resurrect their earlier claim to rule the whole of Tír Conaill until the accession of Éicnechán O’Donnell (d.1207/8) in 1200. Like the other two dynasties, the O’Donnell lineage had a long record as patrons of the church. An inscription records the gift by the chieftain Cathbarr 124 O’Meara, Gerald of Wales, p. 95. p. 127. 126 AFM 3, pp 80–1.

125 Gwynn & Hadcock, Medieval religious houses,

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Fig. 22 Inauguration bath for king in broth of white mare. From Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, NLI MS 700, f. 39v, image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

O’Donnell (d.1106) of a decorated shrine for the ancient psalter known as the Cathach of St Columba, with the words ‘Oróit do Cathbarr Ua Domnaill lasin derna in cumtach’ (‘Pray for Cathbarr Ua Domnaill for whom this shrine was made’).127 (See Fig. 23) The O’Donnells’ traditional inauguration site was at Kilmacrenan where a Columban monastic foundation ruled by the erenagh family of O’Friel (Ó Firgil) lay side by side with the locally venerated Rock of Doon. Although modern tradition points to the Rock of Doon as the location for the inauguration of successive O’Donnell chieftains the only detailed accounts we have of actual inaugurations, in the mid-thirteenth and late sixteenth centuries, state the new O’Donnell was created in a church, inside the cathedral at Raphoe in the midthirteenth century, and inside the church at Kilmacrenan in the late sixteenth century. On the latter occasion, the erenagh O’Friel performed the ceremony, 127 Raghnall Ó Floinn, ‘The 11th–12th century renaissance in metalwork’ in Michael Ryan (ed.), The illustrated archaeology of Ireland (Dublin, 1991), pp 163–6, at p. 166; Micheli, ‘The inscriptions’, p. 21.

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Fig. 23 Base of the shrine of the Cathach, showing inscription asking prayer for Cathbarr O’Donnell, from H.J. Lawlor, ‘The Cathach of St Columba’, PRIA, 33C (1915), 241–3, plate xxxvi.

which was accompanied by the singing of traditional hymns in honour of St Columba.128 Such an indoor church ceremony is quite exceptional in later medieval Ireland. Elsewhere Gaelic leaders were inaugurated out of doors, usually sitting or standing on a venerated stone located on a traditional assembly mound, such as the Rock of Doon is reputed to be.129 One could conclude that a deliberate break with past traditional rites had occurred in the mid-thirteenth century. We have some fragments of evidence from the first quarter of the thirteenth century indicating that the shock of the Norman invasion had caused the Irish to give credence to prophecies of a secular messiah, a king ‘Áed the Helper’, associated in some people’s minds with a revival of druidism and the re-building of Tara.130 In contrast to such paganism, in 1258 we are told the young Domnall Óc O’Donnell, newly returned from an education abroad in Scotland, was installed 128 FitzPatrick, Royal inauguration, pp 182–93. 129 Ibid., p. 193. to warlords, pp 26–7; ALC 1, pp 252–3 (AD1214).

130 Simms, From kings

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as king of Tír Conaill in Raphoe cathedral.131 The bishop of Raphoe from 1253 to 1261 was a reforming Dominican friar, Máel Pátraic Ó Scannail, who was having an exceptionally difficult time exerting control over his diocese, as we gather from Pope Alexander IV’s letter of support issued in March 1256: You have come before us in person and have reported to us that some laymen (nonnulli laici) of your diocese have been instigated by the devil to such a pitch of madness that they not only worship idols but also marry their own kinsfolk and relations. Moreover, if they are rebuked by you or other Catholics for such excesses, or if you excommunicate them for such unhallowed practices, they make bold to argue, like sons of perdition, against the Catholic Faith and against the authority which has been divinely bestowed upon the Apostolic See. Their wickedness even goes so far as to make plots for the murder of those who censure their conduct.132 For this cause you have come to seek prompt and salutary direction from us, as to the manner in which you should act, when some of the faithful of those parts are found to be contaminated with such errors, and when there is reason to fear – which God forbid – that the contagion may spread more widely. Relying on your prudence, therefore, we authorize you by these presents to regard the aforesaid laymen as manifest emissaries and ministers of Antichrist; to wield the sword of ecclesiastical censure against them; and likewise to invoke the aid of the secular arm, in the event of their refusing, after diligent admonition from you, to abandon their errors and excesses, and to return humbly and reverently to the unity of the Church within a suitable period.133 The reference to these ‘idolators’ eventually returning to the unity of the church rules out the idea that they were actual pagans. These persons repeatedly described as ‘laymen’, who could yet infect faithful Catholics with a belief in their right to question the authority of the bishop and the pope, may have been the unordained church rulers or erenaghs of Tír Conaill, particularly those associated with Columban foundations, all of which were claimed, in a Late Middle or Early Modern Irish poem beginning ‘Feis gach toighe go Doiri’, to owe hospitality duties to the erenagh of Kilmacrenan, which was otherwise known as Doire Eithne, or the ‘oak-grove of Eithne’.134 131 Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, pp 106–7; FitzPatrick, Royal inauguration, pp 173, 182– 3, 187–8; Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 27–9. 132 Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Raphoe and Derry in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’, Donegal Annual, 4 (1959), 84–100: 94–5. 133 MacInerny, A history of the Irish Dominicans, 1, p. 178. Latin original in M.P. Sheehy (ed.), Pontificia Hibernia: medieval papal chancery documents concerning Ireland, 640–1261 (2 vols, Dublin, 1962–5), 2, p. 251. 134 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 615, p. 57. See Anne O’Sullivan and Máire Herbert, ‘The provenance of Laud Misc. 615’, Celtica, 10 (1973), 174– 92: 190. A transcript of the whole manuscript can be found in Máire Herbert, ‘Duanaire

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Columban churches in Raphoe diocese were given grounds for grievance against the pope when Innocent IV, in November 1254, granted the bishop of Cenél Eógain, Gilla an Choimded Ó Cerballáin (O’Carolan), permission to transfer his diocesan see from Ráith Lúraig (Maghera, county Derry), to the Columban church settlement of Derry. One effect of this move, initially requested in 1247, was to end the anomalous status of the abbot of Derry. Under the high-king Muirchertach MacLaughlin, Derry had been elevated to replace Kells as mother-church to the Columban foundations in Ireland, and its abbot, Flaithbertach Ó Brolcháin (d.1175), had been awarded equal rank with the new diocesan bishops.135 Entries for the late twelfth and early thirteenth century in the Annals of Ulster refer to monastic officers in Derry by their pre-reform titles, the fer léiginn, or ‘lector’,136 the abbot as comarba or ‘heir’ of Colmcille,137 the ‘great cellóir [manciple or cellarer] of the Recles of Doire’,138 the airchinnech or ‘erenagh’ of Derry.139 In 1204, it became clear that the abbot of Derry was still determined to retain his primacy over all Columban churches. A new Benedictine monastery, erected on the site of the former chief Columban foundation on the island of Iona, was forcibly dismantled by the monks of Derry and other northern Irish clerics led by Fogartach Ó Cerballáin, bishop of Cenél Eógain (Ráith Lúraig), Máel Ísu Ó Dorig, bishop of Cenél Conaill (Raphoe), Amalgaid Ó Fergail, abbot of Derry, and his future successor, Ainmire Ó Cobthaig, together with the Augustinian abbot of St Peter and Paul’s at Armagh. Amalgaid Ó Fergail and his supporters then claimed the title abbot of Iona, but the Scottish Benedictine abbot Cellach had letters of protection from the formidable pope Innocent III, and continued in office.140 Thereafter, to further curb its power, the Columban monastery of the ‘Black Cell’ at Derry was affiliated to the Arroasian Augustinian house of St Peter and Paul’s at Armagh and, when Bishop Ó Cerballáin transferred the see of the diocese of Cenél Choluim Cille i Laud 615: An Téacs’ (MA, NUI Galway, 1970). I am much indebted to Máire Herbert for lending me, long since, a copy of her transcripts of these poems. While Eithne is the name of a mythical female sovereignty figure, it is also given as the name of Colmcille’s mother in Adomnán’s early Life of Columba, and she is named as patroness of Tobberenny or the ‘Well of St Eithne’ in the parish of Kilmacrenan, which was said to run with blood whenever an O’Donnell died. FitzPatrick, Royal inauguration, pp 186–7 and note 86; Andrew O’Kelleher and Gertrude Schoepperle, Betha Colaim Chille: Life of Columcille compiled by Manus O’Donnell in 1532 (Chicago, 1918, repr. Dublin, 1994), pp 110–11, section 117. See also Claire Dagger, ‘Eithne Ban-dia agus Ban-Naomh’ in Pádraig Ó Fiannachta (eag.), Léachtaí Cholm Cille XV: Ár Naomhsheanchas (Má Nuad, 1985), pp 61–78. 135 AU 2, pp 132–3 (AD1158) and see above, p. 79. 136 AU 2, pp 206–7 (where lector Ó Muiredaig shares surname of bishop Ó Muiredaig who died same year), 216–17 lector Ó Fercomais, 244–5 lector Ó Muiredaig, 266–7 lector Ó Milliugáin (AD1185, 1189, 1207, 1220). 137 AU 2, pp 180–1, 228–9, 258–9, 266–7 (AD1175, 1198, 1215, 1220); but see p. 256 (AD1214) where the coarb is styled ‘ab’ or ‘abbot’. 138 AU 2, pp 256–7 (AD1214). 139 AU 2, pp 196–7, 264–5 (AD1180, 1219). 140 Gwynn, ‘Raphoe and Derry’, pp 92–3; AU 2, pp 240–3 (AD1204).

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Eógain to Derry, a separate secular chapter of canons was installed in St Columba’s ‘great church’ at Derry which now became the diocesan cathedral.141 Another important consequence of the erection of Derry into the diocesan see for Cenél Eógain was the transfer of the peninsula of Inishowen to the newlynamed Derry diocese and out of the control of Raphoe. This reflected the territorial expansion of Brian O’Neill (1241–60), king of Tír Eógain and soidisant ‘king of the kings of Ireland’. His marriage to Cecilia, daughter of MacLaughlin, and subsequent defence of her family’s homeland of Inishowen, had caused him to break with his former O’Donnell allies, and he had even made an unsuccessful attempt to replace them in the kingship of Tír Conaill with a candidate from the O’Cannon dynasty.142 A garbled memory of the repercussions from these events is found in an early seventeenth-century catalogue of the bishops of Raphoe, though this sees Bishop Ó Scannail’s successor Cairbre Ó Scuaba as the main protagonist rather than Ó Scannail himself: Kairbry o Sguaba was the first that lost Derry and the side Loghfoyle, for at thie [time] O Karrealin war Bp. of Rathloura, commonly called Machara, & the Natives of Tyreconnell, contrary to all equitie and conscience, did maintain him in the Bk of Rapho, because he war both their frend and  withal he did largely corrupt them with bribes for to assist him against the Bp. o Sguaba, whereupon the Bp of o Sguaba did both curse, excommunicate, and suspend the people of Tyrconnell; under which excommunication they lay for the space of forty yeares, until at last the Bp. O Sguaba being dead, and the controversie undesided, the translation was corruptly and falsely made from Machara to Derry and the side Loghfoile ever since. He died at Rome anno 1274.143 However confused this account, the basic facts of the loss of Derry and Inishowen from the Tír Conaill diocese in the mid-thirteenth century, the inhabitants’ defiance of the bishop of Raphoe’s authority, and presumably his fulminating of the major sentences of excommunication for which he had received papal backing, are borne out by contemporary records. Pope Alexander IV had authorized Bishop Ó Scannail to appeal for support to secular rulers in the area, and clearly Domnall Óc O’Donnell’s inauguration in the cathedral at Raphoe in 1258 indicated his support for the bishop. O’Donnell’s chief poet, Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide (MacNamee), mentions participating at the ceremony in the church at Raphoe in one poem, and later on, in another, he celebrated the newly-built cathedral at Armagh after Ó Scannail’s elevation to the primacy.144 Ó Firgil (O’Friel), the erenagh of Kilmacrenan, on the other 141 Gwynn & Hadcock, Medieval religious houses, p. 68. 142 Above, p. 98; Simms, ‘Tír Eoghain “North of the Mountain”’, pp 157–9. 143  MacInerny, A history of the Irish Dominicans, 1, pp 287–8. 144 Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, pp 106–7, 190–203.

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hand, was apparently leading those clergy of Tír Conaill who were intent on reclaiming Derry. In 1261, the Annals of Ulster lament that: The most worthy of the clergy of Cenel-Conaill were killed by Conchobur Ua Neill and by the Cenel-Eogain in Doire of St. Colum-cille, around Conchobur Ua Firghil. Conchobur Ua Neill was, however, killed immediately, through miracle of Colum-cille by Donn Ua Breslen, chief of Fanat.145 The death of Conchobar O’Neill, a brother of the late King Brian, was lamented by the poet Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide with the words: ‘Just now the son of Niall Ó Néill was in succession to his patrimony; Conchobhar was plucked from us all like a flower that bears no fruit.’146 Two years later, the chieftain Donn O’Breslin (Ó Breisléin) was killed by Domnall Óc O’Donnell in the court of the bishop at Raphoe.147 These events took place against the background of an episcopal succession dispute. Following the promotion of Bishop Ó Scannail to the archbishopric of Armagh in 1261, the cathedral chapter of Raphoe had split in their choice of his successor, some opting for the abbot of the ‘Black Cell’ in Derry, and others for the archdeacon of Raphoe. Ó Scannail as primate disallowed the archdeacon’s candidacy, and the pope refused to accept the abbot of Derry, appointing instead an Italian Franciscan friar, John de Alneto. Not surprisingly, John de Alneto found the situation in Raphoe more than he could handle, and resigned on the grounds of infirmity in 1265.148 Primate Ó Scannail then recommended Cairbre Ó Scuaba, a fellow-Dominican, to succeed him in Raphoe, and he was duly consecrated bishop in 1266. As we have seen, Ó Scuaba seems also to have experienced a lot of opposition, and spent a number of years in exile from his diocese.149 It seems likely that O’Donnell’s execution of O’Breslin was connected to the disputed episcopal succession. It may also be significant that the sub-chieftaincy of Fanad was transferred from the O’Breslin family into the hands of a junior branch of the O’Donnell dynasty by the end of Domnall Óc’s reign.150 Some echoes of this controversy may be traced in a series of verses copied from a lost thirteenth-century manuscript known as the ‘Old Book of Fenagh’. Fenagh is in north Leitrim, which was included in the overlordship claimed by Domnall Óc O’Donnell at that period,151 and the verse anthology includes many poems specifically linked to the secular and ecclesiastical politics of Tír Conaill. One of these, Cairbre Eogan Énna éimh, argues that although Inishowen was the original homeland of the Cenél Eógain, they have now changed their location: 145 AU 2, p. 331 (AD1261). ‘Fanat’ is the peninsula of Fanad, county Donegal. 146 Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, p. 157. 147 AU 2, p. 333 (AD1263). 148 Gwynn, ‘Raphoe and Derry’, pp 96–8; Edward Maguire, A history of the diocese of Raphoe: part I: ecclesiastical (2  vols, Dublin, 1920), 1, pp 72–4. 149  MacInerny, A history of the Irish Dominicans, 1, pp 285–96. 150 Ann. Conn., pp 172–3 (AD1281). 151 Ibid.

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The race of great Eoghan did not like To be confined to one cantred of land; So they extended their arms of battle Until they reached great Ard-Macha. Ard-Macha belongs to Eoghan’s race, And Derry to the race of Conall … 152 The next poem, ‘Éistid re Conall calma’, is even more emphatic, and claims that Derry was a royal seat of three kings of Tír Conaill (Ainmire, Báetán and Áed mac Ainmirech) even before it was granted to Columba for his church.153 These poems are important as giving some idea of the kind of arguments put forward by educated lay erenaghs against the changes overtaking them in the course of the thirteenth century. Another poem from the same ‘Old Book of Fenagh’ which represents St Caillín prophetically criticizing the latest generation of bishops as having abandoned the former ecclesiastical virtue of hospitality, without abandoning the vice of concubinage,154 is probably directed against the bishops of the diocese of Ardagh in which Fenagh lay,155 rather than zealous Dominicans like Ó Scannail and Ó Scuaba. Other Ulster dioceses had a more gradual evolution towards change. The medieval bishops of Clogher do not appear to have enforced canon law forbidding clerics in major orders to have wives and children, contenting themselves with taxing the dowries of the daughters of rectors, vicars, curates and erenaghs.156 In 1308, we hear of the erenaghy of Muintir Cuilléan, vacant by the death of Patrick Ó Cuilléan, an erenagh described as ‘chaplain’, implying he was in priest’s orders, being passed on by the bishop to the Reverend Nemeas Ó Cuilléan, ‘chaplain’, together with his son.157 Remarkably few new monastic foundations were established in Gaelic Ulster in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the diocese of Raphoe, only the Cistercian abbey of Assaroe was founded before 1400, with a daughter-cell at Kilmonaster, county Donegal, founded c.1194 in an area that later became part of Derry diocese.158 The Cistercian abbey of Newry, in the diocese of Dromore, and the Arroasian Augustinian canons of St Peter and Paul at Armagh, were also fresh foundations made in the first wave of the twelfth-century reform, before the Norman invasion.159 However, most of the early introductions of the rule of 152 Bk Fen., p. 399. 153 Bk Fen., p. 405. See Katharine Simms, ‘The Donegal poems in the Book of Fenagh’, Ériu, 58 (2008), 37–53: 48. 154 Bk Fen., pp 98–103. See Simms, ‘Frontiers in the Irish church’, p. 196. 155 There was a schism in thirteenth-century Ardagh, with rival bishops being appointed by the provinces of Armagh and Tuam respectively: see NHI 9, pp 271–3. 156 William O’Sullivan, ‘Two Clogher constitutions’, Clogher Record, 15:3 (1996), 145– 55: 4; idem, ‘Two Clogher constitutions’ in T. Jones and E.B. Fryde (eds), Ysgrifau a Cherddi Cyflwynedig i Daniel Huws: essays and poems presented to Daniel Huws (Aberystwyth, 1994), pp 351–72, at pp 356, 362, 368; Jefferies, ‘Papal letters’, p. 94. 157 Nicholls, ‘The Register of Clogher’, pp 373–4. 158 Gwynn & Hadcock, Medieval religious houses, pp 127, 138. 159 Ibid.,

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Augustinian canons into the ecclesiastical province of Armagh, whether this involved the stricter and more organized order of Arrouaise or not, represented a reorganization of an early Christian foundation, rather than a dispossession of the original community or the endowment of a ‘green field’ site.160 This seems to have made it difficult to attain a clean break with the concept of erenagh families having hereditary claims on monastic lands, thus incurring the associated problems of laicised monks and concubinary abbots.161 The new thirteenth-century orders of the Dominican and Franciscan friars, that were spreading rapidly elsewhere in Ireland, hardly touched Gaelic Ulster initially. The Dominican bishops of Raphoe, Ó Scannail and Ó Scuaba, had originally come from the Dominican house in Drogheda. A lone Dominican friary was established in Derry in 1274, about the time of Ó Scuaba’s death, whereas in those areas of the Armagh province settled by the Anglo-Normans, there were Dominicans in Coleraine, Newtownards, Carlingford and Drogheda. The only Franciscans established in the area of Gaelic rule before 1400 were the friars brought to Armagh by Archbishop Ó Scannail c.1263, whereas there were early houses established in the Anglo-Norman areas at Downpatrick, Dundalk and Drogheda. The imbalance was only to be redressed after 1400, with the surge in lay and ecclesiastical piety associated with the Observantine reform among the mendicant orders, which saw friaries, particularly those of the Franciscan Third Order regular, mushrooming across Ulster under the patronage of local Gaelic leaders.162 Another major brake on the pace of ecclesiastical change in Ulster was the Anglicization of the archbishopric of Armagh from the beginning of the fourteenth century. The English and Anglo-Irish archbishops resided in the southern, or Louth part of their archdiocese, seldom venturing northwards to conduct visitations of the Gaelic parishes in person, instead delegating this duty to the Gaelic dean and chapter of Armagh cathedral, themselves drawn from the hereditary clerical families of the area. The two parts of the archdiocese came to be separately administered as ‘Armagh among the English’ and ‘Armagh among the Irish’, and the city of Armagh itself relapsed into neglect and decay, after a brief period of vigorous revival in the later thirteenth century under the guidance of two outstanding native Irish primates, Ó Scannail and Mac Máel Ísa. pp 142, 157. 160 This appears to have been the case with Inchcleraun, Inchmore and Mohill in the diocese of Ardagh, the nuns of St Brigit at Armagh, the canons of Louth and Termonfeckin in Armagh diocese, the canons of Clogher, Clones and Devenish in Clogher diocese, the canons of the Black Cell and possibly also the Cistercian nuns in Derry, Muckamore Priory in the diocese of Connor, the canons of Bangor, Movilla and Saul in the diocese of Down, the canons of Drumlane in the diocese of Kilmore. See Gwynn & Hadcock, Medieval religious houses, pp 150–1, 153–6; P.J. Dunning, ‘The Arroasian Order in medieval Ireland’, IHS, 4 (1944–5), 297–315: 301–3, 306–15; M.-T. Flanagan, ‘St Mary’s Abbey, Louth, and the introduction of the Arrouaisian observance into Ireland’, Clogher Record, 10:2 (1980), 223–34: 229–32. 161 See Colton’s visitation of the Black Cell in Derry below, pp 315–17. 162  See Gwynn & Hadcock, Medieval religious houses, and below, pp 319–21.

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A R M AG H A N D T H E P R I M AC Y O F N I C H O L A S M AC M Á E L Í S A

The English government in Ireland had many reasons for wanting to take control of the primacy. Their hope of bringing the whole hierarchy of the Irish church into the sphere of royal influence would have been most easily achieved by making Dublin rather than Armagh the primatial see, and this was quite possibly the reasoning behind the transfer of the venerated Bachall Ísa or crosier of St Patrick from Armagh to Dublin during the justiciarship of William fitz Audelm.163 Dublin’s claim to primacy was more explicitly voiced by Archbishop Henry of London (d.1228), and was acrimoniously pursued in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but without permanent success.164 Another motive for controlling the see of Armagh arose from the English colonization of county Louth. This began in the last years of the reign of King Murchad O’Carroll of Airgialla (d.1189).165 Historically, the north of Louth had constituted the Ulaid sub-kingdom of Conaille Muirthemne, and the whole area had been claimed by Armagh as part of the great ‘terminus’ of St Patrick outlined in the seventh-century ‘Book of the Angel’.166 The Synod of Rath Breasail (1111) had consequently included Louth in the new diocese of Armagh. Meanwhile, political ownership of the area had passed to the O’Carroll kings of Airgialla, who were based in what is now county Monaghan. By the middle of the twelfth century, the Louth area had been reassigned to the Airgiallan diocese of Clogher, with the Augustinian church at Louth itself becoming the new diocesan see, under Bishop Christian Ó Morgair, the brother of St Malachy. Gwynn has plausibly argued that this had been the price exacted by King Donnchad O’Carroll for the decisive military support that established Malachy in power at Armagh in the teeth of Clann Sínaich opposition.167 However, O’Carroll expansionism had been abruptly halted by the English colonization of county Louth. The last O’Carroll king of Airgialla was blinded and executed in 1193.168 The Irish bishop of the Airgiallan diocese transferred his see back from Louth to the original site at Clogher, and the primates reclaimed the county Louth area once more as part of their diocese of Armagh. The bishops of Clogher naturally contested this loss of territory for the next fifty years, but without lasting success.169 163 Above, p. 86. 164 Watt, The church and the two nations, p. 112; idem, ‘The disputed primacy of the medieval Irish church’ in P. Linehan (ed.), Proceedings of the 7th International Congress of Medieval Canon Law (Città del Vaticano, 1988), pp 373–83. 165 Brendan Smith, Colonization and conquest in medieval Ireland: the English in Louth, 1170–1330 (Cambridge, 1999), pp 23–4. 166 See above, pp 56–7. 167 Above pp 76–7; Smith, Colonization and conquest, pp 11–22. 168  Smith, Colonization and conquest, p. 33. 169  Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Armagh and Louth in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 1:2 (1955), 17–37; Brendan Smith, ‘The Armagh–Clogher dispute and the “Mellifont Conspiracy”: diocesan politics and monastic reform in early thirteenth-century Ireland’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 14:2 (1991), 26–38.

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It did not please the English king or his representatives in Ireland that such a populous and prosperous part of the colony should be under the ecclesiastical rule of a Gaelic-Irish archbishop. The problem was that canon law assigned a major role in the election of the primate to the cathedral chapter at Armagh, largely native Irish in composition. The first attempt of the government to hold a one-sided and badly attended elective assembly in county Louth, rather than in Armagh cathedral, was disqualified by the Pope as uncanonical and, after a dispute lasting some years, King John agreed to confirm Echdonn mac Gille Uidir in the archbishopric and in 1206 released his temporalities, taken into the king’s hands during the vacancy. Perhaps as a consequence of the compromise then reached, the next archbishop, the Anglo-Norman Luke de Netterville, was elected unopposed in 1217, and set an ominous example for his later English and Anglo-Irish successors by residing in the town of Drogheda in Louth, rather than in his archiepiscopal see among the Irish.170 On the death of de Netterville in 1227, the Irish chapter at Armagh were swift to elect a native Irishman as his successor, Donatus Ó Fidabra, bishop of Clogher. This ran counter to the plans of Anglo-Norman churchmen like Archbishop Henry of London, but was agreed to by the king, as it neatly put an end to Ó Fidabra’s attempts, as bishop of Clogher, to claim back the territory of county Louth. Once he became archbishop of Armagh, Donatus was just as vigorous in arguing for the retention of Louth within Armagh’s jurisdiction, and even argued unsuccessfully that he should be allowed to annex the remaining territory of Clogher diocese.171 Controversy recommenced with Donatus’ death in 1237. An English Dominican, Robert Archer, was elected in 1238 but never consecrated. Pope Gregory IX then intervened in 1239 to appoint a complete outsider, the German Albrecht Suerbeer, who resigned his see in 1246 and was translated to Prussia. King Henry III then authorized a quick election to forestall another papal provision, but the Armagh chapter’s choice of the controversial bishop of Ráith Lúraig (later Derry), Gilla an Choimded Ó Cerballáin (O’Carolan), was not acceptable to the Anglo-Irish clergy. Pope Innocent IV voided the election and appointed an Italian Dominican, Brother Rainer or Reinaldo.172 Archbishop Reinaldo was only present in Ireland from 1248 to 1252. He was succeeded briefly by a local Armagh cleric, Abraham Ó Conalláin (d.1260), who had already been administering the diocese as archpriest of Armagh in his predecessor’s absence. With his death, Máel Pátraic Ó Scannail, as we have seen, was transferred from an even more difficult posting in Raphoe diocese by an unusually unanimous election of the Armagh clergy.173 The vigorous primatial careers of both Máel Pátraic Ó Scannail (O’Scannell, O’Scanlon, 1261–70) and his immediate successor Nicholas Mac Máel Ísa 170 Watt, The church and the two nations, pp 71–2, 226–30; Smith, ‘The Armagh–Clogher dispute’, pp 31–2. 171 Smith, ‘The Armagh–Clogher dispute’, pp 32–3. 172 MacInerny, A history of the Irish Dominicans, 1, pp 83–166. 173 Ibid., pp 180–8.

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(MacAleese? 1272–1303) went far to restore Armagh to a position of moral leadership and effective authority at the head of the Irish hierarchy. Even before receiving the temporalities of the diocese from royal officials, in January 1262, Ó Scannail held his first provincial council at Drogheda, attended also by some bishops from the province of Tuam and canons from Dublin archdiocese, together with the justiciar Richard de la Rochelle and other lay magnates and, in their presence, he firmly reasserted his rights and privileges as primate.174 Ó Scannail went on to rebuild the crumbling settlement at Armagh itself. The apparent necessity for this comprehensive programme of renewal suggests that the foreign primates, when they stayed in Ireland at all, had imitated Luke de Netterville in residing principally in county Louth, where the lands of the early Christian foundation of Dromiskin and the abortive Augustinian canonry at Termonfeckin were converted into archiepiscopal manors. The annals report that in 1263/4 Ó Scannail built an enclosing ditch round the ecclesiastical settlement at Armagh, and founded a house of Franciscan friars there.175 They do not explicitly record Ó Scannail’s archiepiscopal palace being built at this time, but the scanty architectural remains on Bishop’s Court Hill, a short distance outside Armagh itself, display affinities with the early stages of the Franciscan friary at Armagh,176 and in 1266 we hear of the revenge killing ‘outside the door of the court of the Lord Archbishop’ of Lochlainn MacCann (Mac Cana) at the hands of Echmarcach O’Hanlon, chief of Airthir.177 Also in 1266, Ó Scannail began building a large new cathedral of St Patrick within the settlement’s enclosed area. The completed building, whose foundations now underlie the present Church of Ireland cathedral, was eulogized by the eminent ollam of poetry, Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide. His ode was presumably commissioned by Ó Scannail, whom he had encountered earlier in Raphoe.178 The poet describes the cathedral as three times the size of an ordinary church, the windows decorated with blue stained glass, the doorways hung with green silk curtains: The beautiful altar is draped in purple silk with white edges; every drape in the city of Rome would be better upon that altar. As well as lovely mass cowls there are chalices of gold in the beautiful chapel; beloved is the building of letters and books that is not leaky, dark nor misshapen.179 174 Sughi, Reg. Octaviani, 2, pp 485–6; MacInerny, A history of the Irish Dominicans, 1, pp 182–7. 175  AU 2, pp 336–7. 176  Christopher Lynn, ‘The site of Bishop’s Court, Mullymore, Co. Armagh’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 8:1 (1975/6), 121–32. 177  Apparently Lochlainn MacCann had previously killed Echmarcach’s father on the orders of the late King Brian O’Neill – AU 2, pp 304–5, 340–1 (AD1246, 1266); Katharine Simms, ‘The O’Hanlons, the O’Neills and the Anglo-Normans in thirteenth-century Armagh’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 9 (1978), 70–94: 80–2. 178 Williams has calculated that the poet may have died in 1272, in the first year of Mac Máel Ísa’s primacy. Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, p. 4. 179 Williams,

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That same year, Ó Scannail consecrated his fellow-Dominican Cairbre Ó Scuaba to the diocese of Raphoe, and held a solemn ceremony to dedicate the Franciscans’ cemetery at Armagh which was attended by the bishops of Raphoe, Down and Connor. He even visited the court of the English king, in 1268, and obtained a confirmation of his rights as primate. This flurry of activity was very necessary if the traditional role of Armagh at the head of the Irish church was to be continued. The diocese of Meath at this time was questioning Armagh’s right to interfere in its affairs, the province of Tuam was arguing against its subordination to the primacy, and Dublin wanted to take over the primacy itself.180 Ó Scannail died in 1270, but his successor, Nicholas Mac Máel Ísa, or Nicholas ‘of Ardagh’ (1272–1303), was to defend the Irish hierarchy and Armagh’s position at its head even more vigorously. Although he was accused of receiving and protecting kinsmen from Ardagh who had warred against the English, the records show this archbishop was concerned to defend the rights of both the colonial and the Gaelic Irish clergy against any and all secular rulers, acting out on the smaller stage of Ireland the contemporary dispute of the popes against the kings of France and England. Gwynn has pointed out that Mac Máel Ísa owed his early successes to an alliance, from 1282 to 1288, with the clerical justiciar, Bishop Stephen de Fulburn of Waterford, whose brother, Walter de Fulburn, was contending for the bishopric of Meath with the primate’s support, although Pope Honorius IV was eventually to decide in favour of Walter’s rival.181 A report on the conduct of the Anglo-Irish exchequer, hostile to both Stephen de Fulburn and the primate, was sent to the king at this period. Parts of its contents foreshadowed relations between Armagh and the crown for the rest of the Middle Ages: In Ulster bishoprics subject to Armagh, as Clogher, Derry, Raphoe, Kilmore … the Archbishop of Armagh appropriates to himself vacancies and demands of licence and appoints bishops therein against the kingly dignity, to the great loss of the king and against his liberties as is said, because it is conceded to the king of England by the Apostolic See that the Church of Ireland should be regulated and subjected to the kingly dignity in the premises as is the Church of England. Some say that the escheator can never go to the bishoprics aforesaid on account of the Irish, and so those bishoprics are more easily passed over … And it would be expedient to the king that no Irishman should ever be an archbishop or bishop because they always preach against the king and always provide their Poems of Giolla Brighde, pp 190–3. 180 MacInerny, A history of the Irish Dominicans, 1, pp 182–7. 181 Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Nicholas Mac Maol Íosa, archbishop of Armagh (1272–1303)’ in Féilsgríbhinn Eóin Mhic Néill, pp 394–405, at pp 397–8.

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churches with Irishmen … so that an election of bishops might be made of Irishmen to maintain their language … In like manner the Dominicans and Franciscans make much of that language.182 The king was to take to heart the recommendation that there should be no further Irish archbishops of Armagh, and a strenuous effort was made to block the election of Irish candidates after Mac Máel Ísa’s death, with only one other Irishman, Archbishop David Mág Airechtaig (McGarrity, d.1346), being appointed before the Protestant Reformation. On the other hand, the renewal of Armagh’s traditional claims to extensive powers, prestige and revenues as laid down by Ó Scannail and Mac Máel Ísa was too tempting for the succeeding English and Anglo-Irish archbishops to renounce. In the late fourteenth century, Primate John Colton, a former justiciar of Ireland, was to make a careful notarial record of the primate’s right to custody of the temporalities of vacant bishoprics in Gaelic Ulster,183 the very claims that were so strongly denied by the English government in the thirteenth century. On 23 September 1291, in the Dominican convent at Trim, Mac Máel Ísa with all the bishops of his province, Irish and Anglo-Irish, announced they had jointly taken an oath which should also apply to the other archbishops and bishops of Ireland. They swore to defend the ancient rights, jurisdictions, liberties and customs of their respective churches against any attack by a lay power, and to join together to defray the costs of a proctor to plead their case in the courts if necessary. Laymen who infringed the church’s rights were to be excommunicated. Bishops who were remiss in enforcing their rights were to be fined, paying 500 marks to the papal camera, and 500 marks to be shared among their colleagues.184 The primate’s approach was very much in line with current thinking in the Roman curia, as proclaimed by Pope Boniface VIII on 25 February 1296 in his bull Clericis Laicos. This denounced the imposition of secular taxation on church property and excommunicated both the authorities imposing taxation on churches and those clergy who were prepared to pay it, unless by special licence of the Holy See. Archbishop Mac Máel Ísa soon demonstrated that his objection to laymen infringing the church’s rights was not confined to the activities of crown officials, or the interests of his own diocese. In 1297, he summoned the king of Tír Eógain, Domnall O’Neill, with his subject chieftains to Armagh, expounded the Pope’s bull to them and set out articles of his own which applied the same principles to local conditions. The Irish chiefs were to safeguard all church lands 182  CDI 3, pp 9–10. See below, p. 319, on the allusion to the role of Dominicans and Franciscans. 183 William Reeves (ed.), Acts of Archbishop Colton in his metropolitan visitation of the diocese of Derry, 1397 (Dublin 1850), p. 1; J.S. Porter (trans.), ‘The metropolitan visitation of the diocese of Derry by Archbishop Colton AD1397’, UJA, 1st ser., 1 (1853), 66–78, 184–97, 232–41: 184. 184 Chart, Reg. Swayne, p. 3.

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and church tenants from exactions of food, labour service or lodgings by their Scottish galloglasses, Irish mercenary soldiers or other servants, and to punish highway robbery, or the plundering of churchmen, by a fine at least fourfold the value of the goods taken, half this fine to go to the enforcing authority and half to the church. Legal claims against churchmen were to be pursued in church courts in the first instance, and the church extended its protection over clerics, pilgrims, nuns, widows and other destitute persons even where these were not living on church lands, so that unless such defenceless persons were guilty of theft, those who attacked them in time of peace were answerable to the church courts. These later clauses recalled the early medieval proclamations of the Cáin Adomnáin (AD697) and the Cáin Pátraic (AD734) for the protection of defenceless innocents and churchmen.185 This resemblance to the ancient proclamations of cána was increased when Mac Máel Ísa went on circuit that year with the relics of saints, joining the bishop of Clogher and a retinue of clerics on a visit to the stronghold of Brian MacMahon (Mac Mathgamna), king of Airgialla,186 where this king and his sub-chiefs also agreed to the primate’s articles, appending their seals as O’Neill and his followers had done to a written copy of the text. Thereafter Donn Maguire (Mág Uidir), king of Loch Erne, and his nobles also bound themselves and their successors to observe the archbishop’s articles.187 With Mac Máel Ísa’s death, 10 May 1303, the sequence of strong reforming Irish primates who were resident in Armagh itself came to an end. The cathedral chapter elected Brother Mauricius, or Michael Mac Lochlainn, lector in the Franciscan friary at Armagh, his office implying the presence of a school there at that time.188 However, King Edward I did not confirm his appointment, or that of the Irish dean of Armagh, provided by Pope Benedict XI. Instead, a long line of English and Anglo-Irish primates began with the consecration of the short-lived John Taaffe, 27 August 1306, followed by that of Walter Jorz, 6 August 1307.189

T H E E N G L I S H A RC H B I S H O P S

It was at this point that the separation of the diocese into the two distinct spheres of ‘Armagh among the English’ and ‘Armagh among the Irish’ really began to 185 See Thomas O’Loughlin (ed.), Adomnán at Birr, AD697 (Dublin, 2001); Etchingham, Church organization, pp 202–5. 186 Named in the document as Lochnlach, this has been identified with the crannóg of Loughleck, or Ballagh Lough, county Monaghan, about half a mile west from the MacMahon inauguration site at Leck. See FitzPatrick, Royal inauguration, p. 208. 187  Nicholls, ‘The Register of Clogher’, 408–23 (this includes a full text and translation of the Bull Clericis Laicos). See also Gearóid Mac Niocaill, ‘Irish law and the Armagh constitutions of 1297’, Irish Jurist, new ser., 6 (1971), 339–44. See above, pp 241–2. 188 MacInerny, A history of the Irish Dominicans, 1, p. 511; C.N. Ó Clabaigh, The Franciscans in Ireland, 1400–1534: from reform to Reformation (Dublin, 2002), p. 124. 189 NHI 9, p. 269.

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take effect. The primates became ordinarily resident on their manors of Dromiskin and Termonfeckin in county Louth, and their manse within the walls of Drogheda town.190 The Gaelic Irish dean who, with the cathedral chapter of Armagh, administered the northern part of the diocese on the archbishop’s behalf, acquired greater authority and influence than attached to deans elsewhere. As Watt and Walsh have emphasized,191 the medieval clergy, whether Gaelic or Anglo-Irish in origin, had common goals in the service of God and concern for the pastoral care of the laity, and shared a common language in the Latin of their liturgy. Cooperation between the archbishops and their northern clergy was the norm rather than the exception. Ulster clerics and ecclesiastical tenants even appealed to the primate for protection against their more unruly neighbours,192 but the problem was that the archbishop was in a weak position to extend such protection north of the Fews mountains that marked the border of south Armagh. One element contributing to the weakened authority of the fourteenthcentury primates was their financial problems. Archbishop Nicholas had left a tangled legacy by alienating church lands in Louth to various recipients without royal licence, and incurring fines thereby.193 The resignation of the learned Dominican Walter Jorz, in favour of his brother Roland Jorz (1311–22), also a Dominican, is attributed by MacInerny to a desire to escape the archbishopric’s financial and legal problems.194 As the fourteenth century went on, the diocese’s low income was also burdened by the rise in papal exactions that was a characteristic of the Avignon curia.195 However, another problem was caused by the primates’ failure to conduct personal visitations of the northern two-thirds of their diocese. Procurations, or customary payments made in connection with the visitation of a parish, cathedral or abbey, represented a significant part of the primate’s overall income. We hear of Primate Sweteman collecting goods to the value of 8 marks from the prior of Louth in payment of the procurations due for his annual visitation of the canons there, and Meath diocese rendering £10 in part payment of procurations for the same primate’s metropolitan visitation.196 North of the Fews 190 Aubrey Gwynn, The medieval province of Armagh, 1470–1545 (Dundalk, 1946), pp 74–6. 191 J.A. Watt, ‘The church and the two nations in late medieval Armagh’ in W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), The churches, Ireland and the Irish, Studies in Church History 25 (Oxford, 1989), pp 37–54; Katherine Walsh, ‘The clerical estate in later medieval Ireland: alien settlement or element of conciliation?’ in John Bradley (ed.), Settlement and society in medieval Ireland (Kilkenny, 1988), pp 361–77. 192 Smith, Reg. Sweteman, pp 56, 95–6, 101–2, 122–3. 193 MacInerny, A history of the Irish Dominicans, 1, pp 595–8. See Smith, Colonization and conquest, p. 76; Diarmaid Mac Íomhair, ‘Primate Mac Maoiliosa and county Louth’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 6:1 (1971), 70–93. 194 MacInerny, A history of the Irish Dominicans, 1, p. 589. 195 Watt, The church in medieval Ireland, pp 147–8, and see Katherine Walsh, A fourteenthcentury scholar and primate:Richard FitzRalph in Oxford, Avignon and Armagh (Oxford, 1981), p. 240 note 7. 196 Smith, Reg. Sweteman, pp 196–7.

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mountains however, we find he frequently delegated these disciplinary tours to commissaries, with the dean of Armagh playing a leading part.197 Where visitations had been conducted by proxy, payment of procurations was irregular and incomplete. In 1368, the diocese of Derry still owed payments for a visitation conducted during the archiepiscopate of Richard FitzRalph (d.1360).198 From the record of Archbishop Colton’s visitation of Derry in 1397, we see that, in Gaelic Ulster, it was not only the parish clergy but the erenaghs who paid when the primate came to visit,199 and Bishop Montgomery of Derry was to remark in the early seventeenth century, with perhaps some exaggeration, that the food contributions made by the erenaghs during visitations were worth thirty or forty times the meagre annual rents they paid the bishop for the church lands they occupied.200 Primates who were absent from Ireland altogether, or confined themselves to the Anglo-Irish portion of their diocese and province, lost much of their potential revenue, and successive archbishops struggled with debts owing to both the pope and the king. As Walsh has noted, the first four archbishops appointed to the primacy after Nicholas Mac Máel Ísa spent little time residing in their diocese, and may never have visited their primatial see at Armagh in person. John Taaffe expired before he left the papal court, while the two brothers Walter and Roland de Jorz, and Stephen Segrave were all born in England and returned there to die.201 However these prelates’ failure to penetrate as far as Armagh ‘among the Irish’ need not have arisen from mere indifference. Ulster experienced turbulent times in the first half of the fourteenth century, beginning with the terrifying violence and destruction of the Bruce invasion, 1315–18, exacerbated by the coincidental north European famine, so that we are told that during those times men ate corpses to survive, and county Louth itself was rendered unsafe by armed bands of Anglo-Irish refugees from the Ulster colony, even when Bruce’s Scottish troops were roaming elsewhere.202 The apparent concessions to Roland de Jorz, contained in Domnall O’Neill’s letters patent of 1315, in which the rebel king of Tír Eogain reiterated promises he made in 1297 to Archbishop Nicholas to exempt Armagh’s church lands from taxation or the billeting of mercenary soldiers, may be misleading. It has been suggested that the manifesto of Bruce’s Irish supporters, ‘The Remonstrance of the Irish Princes to Pope John XXII’, was the work of the disappointed candidate for the Armagh primacy, Friar Michael MacLaughlin.203 Just as the ‘King 197 Ibid., pp 47–8, 72–3, 136–7, 146–7, 203–4, 210–11, 212–13, 221–2, 233–5. 198 Ibid., pp 233–4; see also ibid., pp 51–2, 129, 166. 199 Reeves, Acts of Archbishop Colton, pp 8–11, 16– 19, 40, 54; Porter, ‘The metropolitan visitation’, pp 186–8, 197, 232, 236. 200 Jefferies, ‘Derry diocese’, p. 180. 201 Walsh, A fourteenth-century scholar, p. 239. 202 Gilbert, Chart. St Mary’s, 2, pp 300, 354, 356; Bernadette Williams (ed.), The Annals of Ireland by Friar John Clyn (Dublin, 2007), pp 166–7; Ann. Conn., pp 252–3 (AD1318). 203 J.R.S. Phillips, ‘The Remonstrance revisited: England and Ireland in the early fourteenth century’ in T.G. Fraser and Keith Jeffery (eds), Men, women and war: papers read before the XXth Irish Conference of

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Edward’ referred to in O’Neill’s letters patent is not Edward II but Edward Bruce, so the ‘archbishop of Armagh’ who was to profit from O’Neill’s concessions may have been not Jorz but Friar MacLaughlin.204 The Battle of Faughart in north Louth which saw the defeat and death of Edward Bruce and the end of the Scottish invasion was inevitably followed in 1319 by the earl of Ulster’s campaign to expel Domnall O’Neill from the kingship of Tír Eogain and re-take control of the province. Then, in 1333, came the murder of William de Burgh, the ‘Brown Earl’ of Ulster, bringing government troops northwards to war for at least five years with only partial success against the mixed Gaelic and Anglo-Irish rebel alliance. Even after the truce arranged in 1338, followed by the decision of the justiciar Ralph D’Ufford to depose Henry O’Neill of the Clann Áeda Buide, who had allied with the Brown Earl’s murderers, and instead confirm Áed Remor son of Domnall O’Neill as the new king of Tír Eógain, the citizens of Dundalk continued to provoke Áed Remor by their armed support for Brian, son of Henry O’Neill, chief of Clann Áeda Buide (or ‘Clandeboy’).205 This litany of confrontations meant that the Irish chieftains living north of the Fews mountains grew less and less responsive to the authority of crown officials, who thus became unable to guarantee the safety of an English or Anglo-Irish archbishop when he wished to travel northwards ‘among the Irish’. Archbishop Stephen Segrave (1324–33) was represented ‘inter Hibernicos’ by the dean of Armagh, David Mág Airechtaig, or Ó hAirechtaig (McGarrity, O’Hiraghty). After Segrave’s death, the Irish chapter acted strategically by electing their own dean with a royal licence while he himself was already speeding abroad to gain a papal provision. Their efforts were successful and Mág Airechtaig became the only other Gaelic-Irish archbishop to be appointed to Armagh before the Reformation. Under this primate, there are signs of Armagh resuming its historic position of leadership within the Irish hierarchy. Mág Airechtaig made strenuous efforts to clear the diocese of the burden of his predecessors’ debts, tried to conduct regular visitations of the other dioceses in his province and renewed the legal battle to have Armagh’s primacy over all Ireland unequivocally recognized by the English king in the face of a challenge from Alexander Bicknor, archbishop of Dublin (1317–49).206 While we have no diocesan register for his term in office, a number of regulations passed in later provincial synods are stated to be re-enactments of laws introduced under Archbishop David. Interestingly one of these enactments read:

Historians, held at Magee College, University of Ulster, 6–8 June 1991, Historical Studies XVIII (Dublin, 1993), pp 13–27, at pp 18–20. 204 Phillips, ‘The Remonstrance re-visited’, p. 20; Smith, Reg. Fleming, pp 166–7. 205 Katharine Simms, ‘Late medieval Tír Eoghain: the kingdom of the Great Ó Néill’ in Tyrone Hist. & Soc., pp 127–62, at pp 145–6. See above, pp 123–4. 206 Walsh, A fourteenth-century scholar, pp 240–2.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages The Archbishop renews the statute or statutes of his predecessors Richard and David against mimes, jugglers, poets, [timpanists] or harpers and especially against [kernes], and importunate and wicked seekers, or rather extorters of gifts.207

The implication is that Archbishop David joined the other Irish clergy in their mid-fourteenth-century drive to outlaw payments to professional praise-poets, an episode to be discussed in the following chapter. This attitude on the part of the clergy towards the bardic poets had been criticized in a poem ascribed to Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide as ‘ugly Anglicized learning’ (léigheann gránna gallda) that had nothing to do with the teachings of Rome.208 We find patronage of poets also condemned in the famous statutes passed in the Anglo-Irish parliament at Kilkenny in 1366.209 Such a coincidence of outlook might suggest Archbishop David belonged to the last generation of Irish prelates who, since the Second Synod of Cashel in 1172, had looked to the English government to support their efforts at church reform. On David Mág Airechtaig’s death, the Armagh chapter chose as his successor the distinguished Oxford scholar Richard FitzRalph, already a non-resident canon of Armagh, and member of a prominent local family in Dundalk. The election was replaced by a papal nomination also in favour of FitzRalph and royal confirmation followed in 1347.210 As citizen of a town so close to areas under Gaelic rule, it seems quite possible that FitzRalph understood and spoke Irish, and certainly the English king referred more than once to the value of his services as an ambassador for peace between the Gaelic-Irish and the colonists.211 FitzRalph’s theological position, that a sinner’s alleged penitence for sins of robbery and plunder could not earn absolution unless restitution was made for goods taken, was applied by him to Anglo-Irish border raids as much as to those of the Gaelic Irish,212 and was very compatible with Irish law. Unfortunately, this 207  Chart, Reg. Swayne, p. 11. The word ‘timpanists’ in square brackets represents my translation of the Latin tympanistas which Chart had rendered as ‘drummers’. The timpán in medieval Ireland was a stringed instrument plucked with quills or the fingers. The word ‘kernes’ (native Irish mercenary soldiers) replaces the untranslated Latin kernarii of Chart’s calendar. 208 Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, no. 18, verse 6 – I have differed from Williams’ translation of Gallda, which he renders as ‘barbaric’. The ascription of authorship to the thirteenth-century Gilla Brigte occurs in an eighteenth-century manuscript and is not beyond question, and the poem could belong to a group of mid-fourteenth-century compositions on the same theme. If that were the case, the patron ‘Domnall’ of the descendants of Conn who is invoked in the closing lines of the poem could conceivably have been the fourteenth-century King Domnall Ó Néill (d.1325), or Domnall son of Áed Remor Ó Néill (fl. 1366–70) rather than Gilla Brigte’s patron, the thirteenth-century King Domnall Óc Ó Domnaill. 209 Early Statutes I, pp 446–7. 210 Walsh, A fourteenth-century scholar, pp 248–57. 211 Ibid., pp 266, 289–91; Katharine Simms, ‘The archbishops of Armagh and the O’Neills, 1347–1461’, IHS, 19 (1974), 38–55: 45. 212  Walsh, A fourteenth-century

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very principle of Archbishop Ralph formed one ground for his famous dispute with the friars, whom he accused of too readily absolving sinful parishioners without regard for the rights or views of the parochial clergy, or requiring amendment or restitution first. This dispute was only one of a number of confrontations FitzRalph stirred up. He engaged in violent assertion of his primatial rights over the diocese of Dublin, and when he summoned all his suffragan bishops to a provincial synod in 1352, harangued them on their sinful ways in less than diplomatic language. As Walsh summarizes from the record of the archbishop’s sermon diary: ‘He accused them of being hirelings and plunderers, thieves, robbers, concerned only with merchandise like shopkeepers, of being fornicators and adulterers, gluttons and drunkards’.213 He may have had in mind the notorious Brother Simon, bishop of Derry, whose misdeeds were shortly to be outdone by Bishop Richard O’Reilly of Kilmore, but however justified the primate’s views in the case of some Ulster bishops in the midfourteenth century, we have no indication that he entered their dioceses in person to enforce discipline, as Milo Sweteman and John Colton were to do subsequently,214 and indeed much of FitzRalph’s time in office was spent at the papal court in Avignon. The one action of this primate that was to have a considerable impact on the church in Gaelic Ulster was his decision to publicize the visions of George Grissaphan, a Hungarian pilgrim who visited St Patrick’s Purgatory in 1353. The resultant tract caught the imagination of pious laymen and clerics in many countries across Europe, bringing increased numbers of foreign pilgrims to the shrine for the rest of the Middle Ages, and giving rise to further literary descriptions of the visions they experienced.215 Both Archbishop Milo Sweteman (1361–80) and his successor Archbishop John Colton (1381–1404) conducted occasional visitations in person through dioceses within the area of Gaelic rule, and were able to elicit a considerable degree of constructive cooperation from the Irish chieftains.216 This may not be entirely due to their less confrontational personalities, or to the fact that the surviving archiepiscopal register of Milo Sweteman begins a series of administrative records for the Armagh diocese that continues into the first half of the sixteenth century, giving much more detailed information for the activities of the succeeding medieval primates. It may also be relevant that the treaty of Brétigny (1360) initiated a gap in the Hundred Years War between England and France that allowed the English government to devote more military resources scholar, p. 290. 213 Ibid., p. 329; G.R. Owst, Literature and pulpit in medieval England: a neglected chapter in the history of English letters and of the English people (2nd ed., Oxford, 1966), pp 268, 499; Beryl Smalley, English friars and antiquity in the early fourteenth century (Oxford, 1960), Literature (2nd ed.), pp 244–5. 214 Smith, Reg. Sweteman, pp 18–19, 71–2, 78–9, 133–4, 180–4; Reeves, Acts of Archbishop Colton. 215 See below, pp 324–7. 216 Smith, Reg. Sweteman, p. xiv; Simms, ‘The archbishops of Armagh’, pp 45–50.

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to the defence of its colony in Ireland. The periods during which the archbishops received greatest cooperation from O’Neill, MacMahon, O’Hanlon and Magennis, rulers of the Gaelic frontier territories in the dioceses of Clogher, Armagh and Dromore, normally came just after a political settlement had been exacted by the justiciar of Ireland and the royal army. For example, Sweteman in his letters referred at different times to a treaty (1363–4) between Lionel of Clarence and the O’Neills (King Áed Remor and his son, Domnall),217 and another in 1373, mediated by the archbishop between, on one hand, the justiciar Robert de Ashton and, on the other, Niall Mór O’Neill, his brother Toirdelbach O’Neill, MacMahon, Magennis, and the constable of O’Neill’s galloglass, MacDonald. When the terms of this truce were broken by Geoffrey White of Dundalk, Sweteman wrote to the next chief governor notifying him of O’Neill’s complaint and asking for justice to be done.218 Possibly provoked by the colonists’ bad faith,219 in 1374, O’Neill and Magennis jointly invaded the earldom of Ulster and won a bloody victory over the settlers at Downpatrick.220 In this same year, the primate was confidentially warned that O’Neill claimed ownership of all the church lands of Armagh, that he had robbed the clergy of the rural deanery of Tullahogue ‘even to the bare bodies’, and was now threatening to build his headquarters on the hill of Emain Macha, a part of the primate’s estate. However, Milo claimed he was reluctant to believe such reports of Niall Mór O’Neill, ‘amicum nostrum laicum’, ‘our lay friend’.221 There was more to this situation than met the eye. Already in 1369 Milo had threatened to excommunicate the leading clergy of Tullahogue deanery and deprive them of their benefices, because they had long refused to allow the rents due from church lands there to be paid to the archbishop, leaving him severely in debt to the papal curia,222 so the news that they had subsequently been robbed by O’Neill might not have disturbed him greatly. By 1376, the clerical revolt had spread to the dean of Armagh and the rest of the cathedral chapter. Sweteman travelled to his palace beside Armagh where he met Niall Mór O’Neill and his wife, and they discussed the situation. Sweteman afterwards wrote to their son that on this occasion O’Neill took the archbishop’s missal into his hands with the words: ‘I, Niall O’Neill, having touched and kissed these holy gospels, swear that I will defend you, archbishop of Armagh and primate of Ireland, against all the clergy of your chapter, by all ways and means that I can’.223 217 Smith, Reg. Sweteman, pp 229–30; Simms, ‘Late medieval Tír Eoghain’, p. 146 and note 133. 218 Smith, Reg. Sweteman, pp 7–9, 13–15; Simms, ‘The archbishops of Armagh’, pp 46–7 and note 30. 219 See Curtis, Richard II, pp 131–2, 211–12, where Niall Mór claims in a letter to Richard II (January 1395) ‘I have ever recognized your lordship … and could I have had redress from any officer of yours for the wrongs inflicted upon me I would never have taken redress into my own hands’. 220 Above, p. 131. 221 Smith, Reg. Sweteman, pp 11– 12; Simms, ‘The archbishops of Armagh’, p. 47. See plate I. 222 Smith, Reg. Sweteman, pp 108–10. 223 My translation. The original reads ‘Ego Nelanus Oneyl tactis his sacrosanctis

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Relying on this oath, Sweteman had authorized O’Neill as his seneschal to collect rents on his behalf from his church lands in both the Tullahogue and Armagh deaneries and elsewhere. However, O’Neill then failed to hand over what had been collected. Hearing that this was because the chief had been told Archbishop Milo had been excommunicated by the pope, information that was apparently true but out of date, the primate sent a messenger to Niall Mór with a copy of his papal letter of absolution. As this messenger had been ambushed and robbed of the letter by the rebel dean, Sweteman sent a second copy to O’Neill’s son, almost certainly Niall Mór’s eldest son and heir, Niall Óc, since the primate had earlier described Niall Óc’s licentious younger brothers, Henry and Cú Ulad as ‘hunters ordained by the Devil’ who were persecuting the citizens of Armagh and their womenfolk, and adjured Niall Mór to control their behaviour or incur the penalties contained in the indenture which had been drawn up between the chieftain and the archbishop.224 The incomplete state of Milo Sweteman’s register means that it is quite unclear why the primate needed papal absolution. In 1378, he was still in trouble, and empowered his kinsman Maurice Sweteman, a rector with a degree in civil law, to defend him at the papal court against charges of homicide, heresy, adultery and incest. The charge of heresy echoes an accusation made by an excommunicated knight in county Louth, Sir Thomas de Verdon, but some of the other charges could have originated with the chapter at Armagh, who seemed prepared to go to any lengths to rid themselves of this primate. They had falsely informed Pope Urban V, in November 1363, that the see of Armagh was vacant, and asked him to appoint the Irish bishop of Raphoe, Pádraig Mac Maengail, to the archbishopric.225 More interesting, in some ways, is the reference in Milo’s letter to an indenture drawn up between the primate and O’Neill. The text is lost, but such a formal written agreement, between the spiritual and secular authorities in Armagh, not only recalls the articles drawn up by Nicholas Mac Máel Ísa, and the concessions made in letters patent by Domnall O’Neill in 1316, but it foreshadows a series of similar agreements drawn up between the O’Neills and the archbishops in the fifteenth century.226 Just as Pope Alexander IV had authorized Bishop Ó Scannail to invoke the aid of lay nobles as the church’s ‘secular arm’ when faced with outrageous revolt and threats of assassination in thirteenth-century Raphoe, so Sweteman needed a lay authority as ‘secular arm evvangeliis et per me deosculatis juro quod ego defendam vos archiepiscopum Ardmacanum Hibernie primatem contra omnes clericos vestros de capitulo omnibus viis et modis quam potero’. Smith, Reg. Sweteman, pp 9–11. 224 Smith, Reg. Sweteman, pp 9–11; 139–40; Simms, ‘The archbishops of Armagh’, pp 47–8. 225 Smith, Reg. Sweteman, pp xiv–xvi, 252–4; J.A. Watt, ‘The medieval chapter of Armagh cathedral’ in D. Abulafia, M. Franklin and M. Rubin (eds), Church and city, 1000–1500: essays in honour of Christopher Brooke (Cambridge, 1992), pp 219–45. 226  Simms, ‘The archbishops of Armagh’, pp 53–4; Katharine Simms, ‘The concordat between Primate John Mey and Henry O’Neill, 1455’,

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of the church’ to enforce his rights over the defiant clerics of Armagh, and the only effective lay authority in the diocese of ‘Armagh among the Irish’ at that time was O’Neill. No formal register survives for the primacy of Archbishop John Colton, but we have the decrees of one of his provincial synods, correspondence in connection with his services as mediator between King Richard II and the northern chiefs in 1395, a description of his conversation with a Catalan pilgrim to Loch Derg, and a unique notarial record of his visitation of the vacant diocese of Derry in 1397.227 In 1396, Roger Mortimer with the royal army and the forces of the earls of Kildare and Ormond had invaded Armagh, plundered O’Neill and reasserted control over the earldom of Ulster.228 It may well have been the enforced peace that followed this show of strength that encouraged Colton to undertake a visitation in person across the heartland of ‘the great Irishry’. The Catalan pilgrim who made his journey to Loch Derg also in 1397, reported Colton had warned him ‘neither he nor anyone else could ensure my safety in the lands of King O’Neill or of other lords whose territory I would have to cross before I reached the Purgatory. Unless I deliberately wished to lose my life, I should on no account attempt to go there’.229 It was precisely because it was so unusual for an Anglo-Irish primate to travel in person through the north-west of his province that Colton employed a professional notary to make a certified record of every significant occurrence on each day of his visitation. He was anxious to exercise the same rights and prerogatives that had been claimed by past primates such as Mac Máel Ísa, and to keep an official record of the fact that his prerogatives had been exercised unopposed, because the primacy was in danger of losing these rights by failing to make use of them for such long periods of time. The resultant dry and factual description of quite picturesque and dramatic scenes has a curious fascination, more convincing than a personally prejudiced letter or diary.230 The Catalan pilgrim had commented of the primate: ‘the Irish consider him as Pope’. He could have been simply extrapolating from St Bernard of Clairvaux’s remarks in the Life of St Malachy, but the notary’s account of Colton’s visitation suggests that the archbishop’s appearance in Derry diocese caused quite a sensation. The erenaghs of the little church settlements through which he journeyed exerted themselves unquestioningly to supply his retinue with food, lodgings, guards and transport, even though they sometimes had to pool the resources of two villages to accommodate him. Crowds came from far Archivium Hibernicum, 34 (1976/7), 71–82. 227 J.A. Watt, ‘John Colton, justiciar of Ireland (1382) and archbishop of Armagh (1383–1404)’ in Eng. & Ire., ed. Lydon, pp 196–213; Chart, Reg. Swayne, pp 11–13; Carpenter, ‘The pilgrim from Catalonia’, pp 99–119, at pp 108–9; Reeves, Acts of Archbishop Colton. 228 Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 156–7; AFM 4, pp 746–7 note q. (‘ex MacFirb et Libro Lecan’). 229  Carpenter, ‘The pilgrim from Catalonia’, p. 108. 230 Reeves, Acts of Archbishop Colton; Porter, ‘The metropolitan visitation’.

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and near to attend his celebration of Mass in Derry. The vacant diocese needed his good offices as a bishop to re-consecrate churchyards that had been desecrated by bloodshed, to judge matrimonial cases and to restore the communal character of the Augustinian canonry of the Black Cell. The only sign of opposition to his authority came from the aristocratic archdeacon of Derry, Magister William O’Cahan, and other members of the cathedral chapter, almost all of whom bore the same title of Magister, suggesting they held university degrees, necessarily acquired outside Ireland.231 These at first absented themselves from the archbishop’s tribunal, presumably because they felt the cathedral chapter should have the right to administer the diocese in a vacancy, but when excommunicated for contumacy, they submitted and were absolved. There are no references to any of the churches being in a state of disrepair, something that became a common theme of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sometimes as the result of the religious divide, of war, or simply clerical poverty.232 It would appear that, in the fourteenth century, the erenagh system was working quite efficiently to ensure the material upkeep of the parish churches, the people were reverent and the higher clergy were well-educated. A problem felt by the clergy of Derry themselves was the threat of church lands being annexed by local magnates and they requested the archbishop to issue ‘letters addressed to divers persons, of monitions, suspensions, excommunications and interdict, against O’Donnell, O’Dogherty, O’Cahan, O’Gormely, Donald and Brian Mór, sons of Henry [Aimhréid] O’Neill, on account of their usurpation of the episcopal rights of the church of Derry’.233 Colton was happy to do so, but also directed his attention to the related question of clerical concubinage. The canons of the Black Cell in Derry complained that when their abbot Ragnall Ó hEicertaig resigned, they had deputed one of their number, Brother Áed mac Gilla Brigte Uí Dochartaig, whose surname indicated he was a kinsman of the local O’Doherty lord of Inishowen, to be Guardian of the monastery during the vacancy, and he had usurped sole control of the community’s seal, which ought to be kept locked with three separate keys, in the hands of three members of the community, to prevent any official action being taken unilaterally. Brother Áed then made use of his arbitrary control to alienate moveable goods and real estate of the monastery as a bride-price, or coibche, to purchase the concubinage of Catherine Ní Dochartaig. The problem was that owing to its 231 Reeves, Acts of Archbishop Colton, pp 44–6; Porter, ‘The metropolitan visitation’, p. 187 note l. 232 Mac Cuarta, Catholic revival, pp 18–20; Jefferies, Priests and prelates, p. 78; Jefferies, Papal letters, p. 95. 233 Porter, ‘The metropolitan visitation’, p. 235; Reeves, Acts of Archbishop Colton, pp 50–2. My addition in square brackets, identifying the O’Neills in question as members of the Clann Henry Aimréid based round the modern Newtownstewart in western Tyrone. In 1407, Brian Óc son of Brian Mór O’Neill with his accomplices assaulted, tied up and robbed the next bishop of Derry, John Ó Flannabra (Smith, Reg. Fleming, pp 50–1, and see ibid., pp 59–60 on depredations of O’Doherty).

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Columban heritage, the abbacy of the Black Cell was a richly endowed position, an attractive prize for an aristocrat without ascetic leanings. Similarly, in the fifteenth century, two bishops of Raphoe, Lochlainn O’Gallagher (Ó Gallachair) I and his grandson Lochlainn O’Gallagher II, were to alienate large estates of church land belonging to the diocese of Raphoe, in  order to purchase the concubinage of women from the O’Boyle and MacSweeney chieftains’ families.234 In each case, the size of the bride-price and the high social status of the women involved implied that this was a formal union, sanctioned by society, if not by the church. Nevertheless, if the canons of the Black Cell were not shocked by the breach of celibacy, they were certainly opposed to the loss of community property. Archbishop Colton succeeded in making Brother Áed return the community’s seal. He vainly begged the former abbot Ó hEicertaig to withdraw his resignation, and then presided over the formal election of a new abbot. The canons proceeded to elect the offending Brother Áed mac Gilla Brigte Uí Dochartaig, even when the archbishop offered them the equivalent of a secret ballot, clearly suspecting there was intimidation at work. The primate had no option but to install Brother Áed as abbot, but at the request of the dean and some of the chapter of Derry, he drew up a set of rules for the future conduct of the canons and of Brother Áed in particular, which contained such memorable clauses as: neither thou, nor any canon of the said house, mayest or may give out, expend, or promise, any of the goods of the said house for the keeping of any woman. Item, we ordain, as aforesaid, that no suspected woman be, by thee or any Canon of the aforesaid house, introduced within the precincts of the said house, or sleep or rest within the precincts aforesaid. Item we ordain, that thou, and each and every one of the Canons of the said house, eat together in the common Refectory, keeping up holy and devout reading during the time of refection, and that ye sleep together in one dormitory, within the house aforesaid.235 The implication contained here that the various Augustinian canons of the Black Cell may have been living separately hitherto, perhaps on individual farms of church land, more like the manaig of the Old Irish laws than like cenobitic monks, finds an echo in a complaint of the Anglo-Irish administration about the Cistercian house of Holy Cross, Tipperary, in the late thirteenth century:

234 M.C. Griffith (ed.), Irish patent rolls of James I (Calendar) (repr. of 1830 ed., Dublin, 1966), pp 282–3; Maguire, A history of the diocese of Raphoe, pp 85–95; Gwynn, The medieval province of Armagh, pp 197–8. 235 Porter, ‘The metropolitan visitation’, p. 237.

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the lands of the Abbey of Holy Cross which is under the king’s protection, are without his licence alienated … And the monks of the house, who are all Irishmen, are dispersed in divers places … it is commanded to the Abbot of Mellifont, chief visitor of each house, that he cause to be placed in said abbey monks of English race, to the extent of half the convent, as often as monks of the abbey be removed and sent elsewhere. Because said dispersion and loss was made by said Irish monks, as commonly happens in every place where houses are placed under their rule.236 In these cases, monastic lands were being treated as private rather than communal property by individual ecclesiastics. A more extreme grievance was where secular lords alienated church lands completely. In the opening decades of the fifteenth century, large swathes of church land in south Armagh were occupied by junior branches of the O’Neill dynasty. The earliest of these intruders were the sons of Cú Ulad Rúad son of Niall Mór O’Neill, this Cú Ulad being one of the two princes previously described by Milo Sweteman as ‘hunters ordained by the devil’.237 Some decades later, even more land was annexed by Áed ‘of the Fews’ (d.1475) and Muirchertach, the younger sons of King Eógan son of Niall Óc O’Neill. On the basis of the estates seized at this time, Áed and his descendants were able to found a separate lordship of ‘O’Neill of the Fews’ in south Armagh.238 The only way the archbishops could receive any profit from these holdings thenceforward was to persuade the O’Neills and their followers to pay rent for the lands they were occupying. This was easier said than done. Primate Fleming (1404–16) seems to have paid a band of mercenary soldiers to accompany his bailiffs on their rent-collecting rounds.239 Primate Swayne (1418–39) hardly ever travelled north of the Fews mountains in person.240 Primates Prene, Mey and Bole, however, reverted to Sweteman’s policy of cooperation with the Great O’Neill himself. First King Eógan O’Neill, and then his sons Henry, Áed of the Fews and Muirchertach, engaged in a series of written agreements with the archbishop of the day in which they undertook to protect the archbishop’s messengers, safeguard him on visitations and jointly enforce the payment of his rents, in return for an annual pension, paid in cash or as a consignment of cloth.241 As in the days of Sweteman, a number of these agreements coincide with political submissions or alliances with the Anglo-Irish made when James Butler, the ‘White Earl’ of Ormond or Thomas fitz Maurice 236 James Mills (ed.), Calendar of the justiciary rolls … of Ireland, Edward I (1295–1307) (2 vols, Dublin, 1905, 1914), 1, pp 134–6. 237 Smith, Reg. Fleming, pp 36–7, 150–1, 68–70, 158–60, 189–90. 238  Tomás Ó Fiaich, ‘The O’Neills of the Fews, Pt 1’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 7 (1973–4), 1–64. See also Michael Glancy, ‘The church lands of Co. Armagh: text of the Inquisition of 1609 with introduction and notes’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 1:1 (1954), 67–100: 82–3, 90. 239  Smith, Reg. Fleming, p. 151; see Simms, ‘The archbishops of Armagh’, p. 50 note 47. 240 Chart, Reg. Swayne, pp xii–xiii. 241 Simms, ‘The archbishops of Armagh’, pp 52–4; Simms, ‘The concordat’.

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FitzGerald, the 7th earl of Kildare, was chief governor,242 and they reflect a new era in secular politics in which limited cooperation between the O’Neills and the Anglo-Irish was fuelled by annual payments of black-rent from Dundalk and the remnants of the settler families in the earldom of Ulster. The use of consignments of cloth to reward O’Neill may be linked to the fact that both primates Mey and Bole (or Bull) share the surnames of famous merchant families active in trade between Ireland and England in the mid-fifteenth century.243 This policy of cooperation between the primates and the Great O’Neill of Tír Eógain seems to cease with the death of John Bole. The drastic diminution in the revenues the primates could obtain from the church lands of Armagh, and the rising scale of papal taxation, ended by landing the archiepiscopal see hopelessly in debt. The pope’s demand, that the next primateelect should clear his predecessor’s debts and pay for his own bulls of appointment before he could be confirmed in office, led to almost ten years of vacancy in the see, until the office was given to the papal receiver, Octavian de Palatio from Florence.244 Octavian was an extremely efficient financial administrator. He did much to disentangle the see from its burden of debt, and conscientiously oversaw the conduct of the clergy in the areas of Anglo-Irish rule. However, he not only came to the intricate border politics of Ulster as an outsider, but he did not get on well with Gerald FitzGerald, the ‘Great Earl’ of Kildare, who was chief governor of Ireland for much of Octavian’s term in office.245 Kildare, as we have seen, wielded considerable influence over the O’Neills in the late fifteenth century, and could have usefully offered the archbishop his services as a ‘secular arm of the church’ in the tradition of his father and the ‘White Earl’ of Ormond.

T H E F I F T E E N T H C E N T U RY : T H E O B S E RVA N T M O V E M E N T, L AY   P I E T Y A N D P I L G R I M A G E

The constant absence of the Anglo-Irish primates from areas under Gaelic rule had deprived the Ulster dioceses of leadership and supervision in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, allowing the hereditary church families to grow in influence, and the secular chieftains to lose much of their inhibitions about annexing church property. As the fifteenth century wore on, however, the initiative in church affairs passed out of the hands of the diocesan clergy, or even 242 See above, p. 188, for Mey’s link with Ormond and Bole’s link with Kildare. 243 W.R. Childs and Timothy O’Neill, ‘Overseas trade’ in NHI 2, pp 492–524, at pp 518–19; W.R. Childs, ‘Irish merchants and seamen in late medieval England’, IHS, 32 (2000), 22–43: 34– 42; Gwynn, The medieval province of Armagh, p. 2. 244 Mario Sughi, ‘The appointment of Octavian de Palatio as archbishop of Armagh, 1477–8’, IHS, 31:122 (1998), 145–64. 245 Gwynn, The medieval province of Armagh, pp 25–40.

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the erenagh families, and was taken up by the Observantine friars and by lay aristocrats who came under their influence. One sign of this change is a clause that appears in some of the indentures between the archbishops and the O’Neills, whereby the lay nobles renounce their practice of taking ‘corrections’ or punitive fines from immoral or concubinary priests.246 At the time of their first appearance in the thirteenth century, the orders of friars were set apart from the secular clergy and previous monastic orders by their avoidance of landownership. Another distinctive characteristic of their order was a greater emphasis on using the vernacular language to communicate with ordinary laypeople, not just in sermons, but in songs and hymns, together with the practice of enlivening their sermons with illustrative anecdotes, proverbs and witticisms.247 In Ireland, this was to lead to a ready interchange of ideas with the bardic poets. In the mid-thirteenth century diocese of Raphoe, as we have seen, the lay ruler Domnall Óc O’Donnell and his court poet Gilla Brigte sided with the beleaguered Dominican bishop, Máel Patraic Ó Scannail, while the conservative hereditary churchmen opposed him. However, close identification with the political leaders and vernacular language of a particular population group could give rise to a temptation to take sides. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, friars were accused of inciting minor Irish kings to rebellion against the English, the Franciscan order in Ireland became polarized between its Gaelic-Irish and Anglo-Irish members, and some friars were even said to be employed as covert agents canvassing support in Ulster for King Robert the Bruce during his war with England.248 The pope’s execution of the ringleaders of the Franciscan Spiritual movement in 1318, and the increasing laxity and luxury of the Conventual Franciscan houses, deprived the friars of much of their moral influence by the midfourteenth century. In the (translated) words of the fifteenth-century Irish Franciscan poet, Pilib Bocht Ó hUicinn: St Francis is now almost bereft of honour Breach of the Rule is common in his wood A lengthy indictment lies against his children, Were this the time to make it.249 However a renewal of enthusiasm and ascetic ideals began on the Continent in the late fourteenth century with the rise of groups of friars within the Conventual movement, who wished to dedicate themselves to a more rigorous observance of the early Franciscan rule. Some of these remained in Conventual 246 Simms, ‘The concordat’, pp 75, 78. 247 Owst, Literature and pulpit in medieval England, pp 268, 499; Smalley, English friars and antiquity, pp 41–4, 47–52, 101, 162–3, 251, 253–8, 267–72. 248 Anne Müller, ‘Conflicting loyalties: the Irish Franciscans and the English crown in the high Middle Ages’, PRIA, 107C (2007), 87–106. 249 Lambert McKenna (ed.),

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houses, and attempted to reform them from within, while others pressed for separate houses, independently organized. In Ireland, the movement for separate houses of Observant friars began before 1417, but it was not until 1458–60 that these achieved the right to be separately administered under an Observant vicariate, becoming an Irish province within a fully recognized Observant Franciscan order in 1517.250 In Gaelic Ireland, new friaries of both Conventual and Observant Franciscans were established under lay patronage during the fifteenth century, with less numerous additional houses of Dominican, Augustinian and Carmelite friars, who were also influenced by the Observant movement to return to the ideals of their founders, but by far the greater number of the new religious communities to spring up at this time were the Third Order Franciscans.251 The secular Franciscan Third Order, or Tertiaries, were composed of groups of lay men and women who took modified vows permitting them to marry, and remain living and working in their own homes, but who wore distinctive clothes, observed additional fasts and met regularly for prayer. They originated independently as a movement of lay penitents who were brought under Franciscan supervision in the course of the thirteenth century.252 At that time, they were largely confined to southern Europe, where more advanced urban development had already provided a significant population of literate laypeople. However, the spread of the friars’ Observantine reform across Europe, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century, was accompanied by the spread of the Third Order in northern Europe, including Ireland. In Gaelic Ireland, a developed form of the Third Order was particularly successful, the Third Order Regular, composed of small groups of mixed priests and lay brothers, less highly educated than the First Order Franciscan friars, but living a communal life under vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, supplementing the pastoral care of the local parish clergy and, according to one source, providing an elementary schooling in Latin to boys.253 It could be argued that the lifestyle of the secular Tertiaries, as married laypeople who were yet bound by modified monastic vows, was a concept that would prove particularly attractive to hereditary erenagh families descended from the manaig of early medieval Ireland. Similarly, the lay brothers among regular Tertiaries fitted into an Irish tradition of unordained clerics. However the Irish Tertiaries, both secular and regular, are very poorly documented in the fifteenth century. Ó Clabaigh has drawn attention to what looks like a clear instance of a hereditary erenagh family, the Uí Máel Chairill, who gave their name to the church of Clonkeenkerrill in the diocese of Tuam, adopting the Philip Bocht Ó hUiginn (Dublin, 1931), p. 129. 250 Ó Clabaigh, The Franciscans in Ireland, pp 48–9. 251 Martin, ‘The spread of the religious orders 1420–1530’ (Map) in NHI 2, p. 585; Gwynn & Hadcock, Medieval religious houses, pp 218–305. 252 Ó Clabaigh, The Franciscans in Ireland, p. 82. 253 Ibid., pp 100–2.

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Third Order rule and continuing their hereditary hold on their family church, at some cost to the vow of celibacy, after it became a house of regular Tertiaries some time before 1438.254 He also noted possible examples of the same kind of connection, between hereditary churchmen and Tertiaries in Ulster, in the case of the Ó Moráin family in Raphoe diocese and the Ó Cillín family in Bangor, Down diocese.255 The Tertiaries influenced and were influenced by a wider revival of religious enthusiasm in this period, characterized by the active involvement of literate laypeople. This included the Devotio Moderna movement in the Netherlands, linked to the preaching crusades of Geert Groote from 1379 to 1384 against worldly and concubinary parish clergy, his foundation of the mixed clerical and lay associations of the Brethren (and Sisters) of the Common Life, and the reformed Augustinian canons of Windesheim who were inspired by his teaching.256 The institutions generated by this Dutch movement did not reach Ireland, but Meigs has suggested that the undated bardic religious poem ‘Dursan do mhartra a Mheic Dé’ may reflect the ideal of empathy with Christ’s suffering found in pious literature associated with the Devotio Moderna movement, and in particular the Imitatio Christi or ‘Imitation of Christ’ by Thomas à Kempis.257 There are clearer parallels to be found between themes in bardic religious poetry and English devotional literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, versions of which were translated into Irish in the course of the fifteenth century: such as the ‘Charter of Christ’,258 or the ‘Benefits of hearing Mass’,259 together with Latin tracts on the Life of Christ,260 or on the Virgin Mary.261 A tract that displays clear signs of foreign influence, and could have originated either with the Franciscan Observants or as a translation into Irish of Devotio Moderna material was Riagal na Sacart, the ‘Rule of Priests’, a polemic against priests who kept concubines, which in one recension is couched in the form of a letter addressed to Magnus Mac Mahon (d.1443/4), lord of Fernmag (barony of Farney in Monaghan), exhorting him to arrest clerics’ concubines and confiscate their goods, although leaving the priests alone, to be deposed after due process initiated by an appeal to Rome.262 254 Ibid., pp 96–7. 255 Ibid., pp 84, 104–5. 256 See R.R. Post, The modern devotion: confrontation with reformation and humanism (Leiden, 1968). 257  S.A. Meigs, The reformations in Ireland: tradition and confessionalism, 1400–1690 (New York and London, 1997), p. 25; Aithd., 1, pp 334–7, 2, 207–9. 258 Andrew Breeze, ‘The Charter of Christ in medieval English, Welsh and Irish’, Celtica, 19 (1987), 111–20; Gearóid Mac Niocaill (ed.), ‘Carta Humani Generis’, Éigse, 8:3 (1956), 204–21. 259 Gearóid Mac Niocaill, ‘Disiecta membra’, Éigse, 8:1 (1955), 74–7: 74–6; O’Grady & Flower, Cat. Ir. MSS, 2, pp 555–6. See Salvador Ryan, ‘Popular religion in Gaelic Ireland, 1445–1645’ (2 vols, PhD, NUI Maynooth, 2002), 1, pp 359–66. 260 Cainneach Ó Maonaigh (eag.), Smaointe Beatha Chriost .i. innsint Ghaelge a chuir Tomás Gruamdha Ó Bruacháin (fl. 1450) ar an Meditationes vitae Christi (Baile Átha Cliath, 1944). 261 Peter O’Dwyer, Mary: a history of devotion in Ireland (Dublin, 1988), pp 130–74. 262 Katharine Simms, ‘The legal position of Irishwomen in the later Middle Ages’,

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What is interesting about these new translations or adaptations of Continental teaching is that they can be found intermingled in the manuscript sources with Middle Irish translations of religious material from the pre-twelfth century church schools,263 the fusion giving rise to such startling assertions as that Pope Gregory the Great was of Irish descent and was buried in the Aran Islands, and that John the Baptist was beheaded by an Irish druid, Mog Ruith, who had travelled to Palestine to serve as an apprentice under the New Testament wizard, Simon Magus.264 Material that may once have been intended to educate hereditary clerics with a minimal command of Latin could now be re-cycled for the use of literate laypeople. In some cases, as with the passions and homilies in the Leabhar Breac,265 the literate laity in question may have been the students of the secular bardic schools, who would be equipped to decipher the more archaic language and then transmit the message of the texts to a wider audience through poems or prose re-tellings.266 In other cases, most notably the book of devotion written for Máire Ní Máille which forms the major part of Leabhar Chlainne Suibhne, the lives of Continental saints, biblical apocrypha and tracts such as ‘On the Conditions Necessary for a Good Confession’, ‘Advice to Those who wish to Please God’ are clearly for the use of the aristocratic lay patroness, who was either in a position to read them for herself, or had them read aloud to her.267 The notice of her death in the same manuscript tells us she was not only a joint-founder of the house of Carmelite friars beside her husband’s castle at Rathmullen (county Donegal), but she paid for the Great Hall of the Observant Franciscan abbey at Donegal itself and the erection of ‘many other churches … in the provinces of Ulster and Connacht’. Her lifestyle closely resembled a secular Tertiary, whether she had taken formal vows or not, since we are told: she used to hear Mass once each day, and sometimes more than once; and three days in each week she used to spend on bread and water fare, with Lenten fast, and winter fast, and the Golden Fridays … and the manner Irish Jurist, new ser., 10 (1975), 96–111: 105; Anonymous, ‘Riaghail na Sacart’, Irisleabhar Muighe Nuadhad (1919), 73–9; Ó Clabaigh, The Franciscans in Ireland, p. 95. The MacMahon recension comes in ‘Liber Flavus Fergusiorum’, RIA MS 476, pt ii (23/O/16 ii), f. 17r. See above, p. 156. 263 Gearóid Mac Eoin, ‘Observations on some Middle Irish homilies’ in Próinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter (eds), Irland und Europa im früheren Mittelalter: Bildung und Literatur/Ireland and Europe in the early Middle Ages: learning and literature (Stuttgart, 1996), pp 195–211. 264 O’Grady & Flower, Cat. Ir. MSS, 2, pp 442–3; Martin McNamara, The Apocrypha in the Irish church (Dublin, 1975), pp 64–7; Herbert and McNamara, Irish Biblical Apocrypha, p. 58. 265 Robert Atkinson (ed.), The passions and homilies from Leabhar Breac (Dublin, 1887). 266 For example ‘The Evernew Tongue’ (An Tenga Bithnuad) originated as a tenth-century tract which was revised and elaborated twice in the fifteenth century: McNamara, The Apocrypha, pp 115–18. 267 Pól Breatnach (eag.), Leabhar Chlainne Suibhne: an account of the Mac Sweeney families in Ireland, with pedigrees (Dublin, 1920); Meigs, The reformations, pp 19–21; Ó Clabaigh, The Franciscans in Ireland,

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of her death, after victory over the devil and the world, was in the habit of the friars of Mary, in the monastery which she herself had founded.268 Another Ulster manuscript miscellany from the second half of the fifteenth century, British Library Egerton MS 1781, could have been at least partly written for Cormac Mac Shamradáin (Magauran), bishop-elect of Kilmore, whose father Bishop Cormac Mac Shamradáin of Ardagh is eulogized in a bardic poem it contains.269 Although this anthology also consists in great part of translations or adaptations of the lives of foreign saints, such as St Margaret and St Catherine of Alexandria, the bishop’s less than ascetic churchmanship may be reflected in the fact that its contents also include secular romances like the Travels of Sir John Maundeville and the Wars of Charlemagne.270 The influence of such windows into the culture of contemporary Europe on literate families in Ulster can be seen from some changes in their choice of names for their children. The ruling dynasties continued to call their sons after former Irish chiefs and heroes or Anglo-Irish barons. The sudden adoption in the course of the fifteenth century of the names of Milesius’s sons, such as Eimer (or ‘Heber’) MacMahon in Airgialla, a name that spread to the O’Neills of Clandeboy,271 or Ír MagRagnaill (MacReynolds) in Leitrim,272 or somewhat later Eremon O’Donnell,273 may be a symptom of a newly literate aristocracy, since the Lebor Gábala, the Middle Irish pseudo-history of the prehistoric colonizations of Ireland, was circulating widely at that time.274 However, daughters of chieftains, who tended previously to bear even more conservative mythical names (Úna, Sadb, Étain, Medb), or fantastical names (Findguala, Lasairfína, Barrdub, Dub Lacha, Dub Choblaig), or names based on the element ‘flaith’ – ‘noble’ (Gormlaith, Órlaith, Nualaith),275 were now commonly christened Caiterfína (Catherine)276 or Mairgrég (Margaret),277 or, less frequently, Máire or Maria.278 Among the clerical or learned families, some of the boys also received exotic names like Augustín, Florint, Deinís, Petrus and Marcus, while the coarb Ó Taichlig of Devenish christened his two daughters Lucia and Eva.279 In Ulster, the Franciscans remain the obvious source of inspiration for lay piety, and their influence is most easily documented among the aristocracy. Some pp 152–4. 268 Breatnach, Leabhar Chlainne Suibhne, pp 66–9. 269 Gearóid Mac Niocaill, ‘Dán do Chormac Mág Shamhradhain, Easpag Ardachadh 1444–1476(?)’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 4 (1960–1), 141–6. 270  O’Grady & Flower, Cat. Ir. MSS, 2, pp 526–45. 271 AU 3, pp 150–3; 402–5, 414–15, 426–7 (AD1443, 1496, 1497). 272 AU 3, pp 214–15 (AD1465). 273 AU 3, pp 606–7 (AD1536). 274 See, for example, Katharine Simms, ‘Bards and barons: the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and the native culture’ in Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (eds), Medieval frontier societies (Oxford, 1989), pp 177–97, at pp 190–2. 275 See index entry ‘Women: native names of ’ in AU 4, pp 431–3. 276 AU 3, pp 104–5, 146–7, 236– 7, 256–7 (AD1427, 1440, 1470, 1475). 277 AU 3, pp 198–9, 226–7, 250–1, 366–7 (AD1459, 1469, 1474, 1493). 278 AU 3, pp 324–5, 330–1 (AD1487, 1488). 279 AU 3, pp 14–15, 44– 5, 76–7, 94–5, 116–17, 160–1, 398–9, 574–5 (AD1384, 1400, 1418, 1423, 1431, 1447, 1496, 1529).

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time between 1300 and 1330, the elderly king of east Breifne, Gilla Ísa Rúad O’Reilly, founded a First Order Franciscan house at Cavan, and retired there to live out his remaining years in the habit of a friar.280 It is interesting to note that, subsequently, King Tomás Óc Maguire (d.1480) elected to be buried in the same Cavan friary,281 rather than in his own parish church of Aghalurcher in Fermanagh, or the nearby unreformed Augustinian monastery of Lisgoole. In 1462, King Feidlim son of Brian MacMahon (d.1466) established a First Order Franciscan friary (Conventual) in Monaghan282 and, in 1474, Áed Rúad I O’Donnell founded the First Order Franciscan friary (Observant) at Donegal, where he was buried in 1505, after which his wife Findguala lived there as a Tertiary until her own death in 1528.283 Ó Clabaigh has noted the moral influence of the Observants of Donegal on Tuathal Balb O’Gallagher (Ó Gallchobair, d.1541) who kept a life-long vow always to take prisoners rather than killing anyone in the course of his military expeditions. Magnus O’Donnell (d.1563) claimed it was by the counsel of the friars that he quarrelled with his father for keeping a concubine, though in this case there were political considerations at stake, and the friars of Donegal were also to preach openly in favour of Magnus O’Donnell’s support for the Geraldine League in 1539.284 The moral motivation of those Ulster chiefs who took punitive action against clerical concubines is similarly ambiguous. Primate Mey of Armagh sometimes empowered the princes of the O’Neills to act on his behalf as the secular arm of the church, and confiscate the dowries of concubines, while supposedly leaving the goods of the church untouched,285 although he was uncertain of the wisdom of entrusting this role to men like Henry O’Neill: moved not by zeal or the intention of bringing about a salutary correction, but by his notorious coveteousness, avarice or greed, whereby at the devil’s prompting he had long plotted to acquire for himself not only [the concubines’] goods but the goods of others also’.286 A less controversial symptom of lay religious enthusiasm was pilgrimage and, in Loch Derg, Ulster possessed the most celebrated pilgrimage site in Ireland. De Pontfarcy has argued that, up to the twelfth century, the pre-eminent Patrician pilgrimage site was the mountain of Croagh Patrick in Mayo, explicitly 280 Gwynn & Hadcock, Medieval religious houses, p. 245. 281 AU 3, pp 268–9 (AD1480). 282  AU 3, pp 206–7 (AD1462); Gwynn & Hadcock, Medieval religious houses, p. 255. 283 AFM 5, pp 1282–3, 1392–3. 284 Ó Clabaigh, The Franciscans in Ireland, pp 88, 144, 156; Darren Mac Eiteagáin, ‘The Renaissance and the late medieval lordship of Tír Chonaill’ in Donegal, Hist. & Soc., pp 203–28, at pp 213–15. See above, pp 221, 225. 285 Quigley & Roberts, Reg. Mey, nos. 312, 354, 379. 286 My translation – the original reads: ‘non zelo aut intencione salutifere correccionis, sed intuitu notorie concupiscencie avaricie seu cupiditatis non solum earum sed ceterorum bona pro suo libito acquirenda, prout a longo, suadente diabolo, hec excogitavit’. Quigley & Roberts, Reg. Mey, no. 322. See Simms, ‘The concordat’, p. 75.

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mentioned in the seventh-century life of Patrick by Tírechán,287 while the island cave on Loch Derg, county Donegal, was associated primarily with St Dabeóc.288 When Ireland was first divided into territorial dioceses at the Synod of Ráith Breasail in 1111, only two archbishoprics were created and Leth Chuinn, or the whole northern half of Ireland including Mayo, was adjudged subject to the archbishop of Armagh. However, the revised diocesan structure instituted by the Synod of Kells, in 1152, put Mayo and Croagh Patrick into the new archdiocese of Tuam, and Primate Echdonn Mac Gille Uidir was later to fail in his attempt to make a special case for attaching Croagh Patrick and other Patrician sites in Connacht to the see of Armagh.289 In the context of this loss of Croagh Patrick in the mid-twelfth century, de Pontfarcy suggests, both Armagh and its secular ruler, the high-king Muirchertach MacLaughlin, had every reason to promote the hitherto tangential Patrician associations of the pilgrimage site of Loch Derg in Ulster.290 The church settlement at Saints Island, Loch Derg, was reorganized as a community of Arroasian Augustinian canons about AD1140 probably under the influence of St Malachy of Armagh291 and their presence may have revived earlier penitential exercises associated with the site. A lay vassal of Diarmait MacMurrough (Mac Murchada), king of Leinster, known in later literature as ‘the knight Owein’, went on pilgrimage to Loch Derg and experienced visions there of heaven, hell and purgatory, which he confided to an English monk Gilbert, a future abbot of Basingwerk, who was in Ireland about 1150 organizing the foundation of a Cistercian monastery, probably Baltinglass in Wicklow. Years later, when back in England, Gilbert recounted the story of these visions to his Cistercian brethren and, about 1184, a monk of Saltrey in Huntingdonshire made them the basis of a Latin tract, which rapidly became known across Europe, wherever the Cistercian order had a community. It became an enormously popular story: 150 manuscripts or more preserve the tale in its original Latin version, and over 150 more manuscripts contain translations of the text into many different vernacular languages.292 From the twelfth to the fourteenth century, therefore, one could say that Loch Derg was more famous outside Ireland than at home, where Croagh Patrick was still the better known Patrician site. However, although the story of ‘the knight Owein’ was so widespread, the shrine itself does not seem to have received many foreign visitors at this time. A French nobleman, the Sire de Beaujeu (d.1352), who was in 287 Bieler, The Patrician texts, pp 152–3. 288 Whitley Stokes (ed.), The Martyrology of Oengus the Culdee (London, 1905; repr. Dublin, 1984), pp 260–1; Yolande de Pontfarcy, ‘The historical background to the pilgrimage to Lough Derg’ in The medieval pilgrimage, pp 7–34, at pp 27–30. 289 Sheehy, Pontificia Hibernica 1, pp 185–6. 290 Yolande de Pontfarcy, ‘Le Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii de H. de Saltrey: sa date et ses sources’, Peritia, 3 (1984), 460–80: 476–9. 291 Gwynn & Hadcock, Medieval religious houses, p. 193. 292 de Pontfarcy, ‘Le Tractatus’, p. 460.

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Scotland assisting the Scots in their war against the English, is reported to have visited St Patrick’s Purgatory with his squire Heronnet, who claimed they saw visions of Hell and Paradise there.293 George Grissaphan was a young Hungarian nobleman tormented by memories of war crimes he had committed while campaigning in southern Italy. In 1353, he chose to go on pilgrimage to the famous but remote site of Loch Derg as an extreme form of penance. The régime of the medieval pilgrimage to Loch Derg seems to have included a fifteen-day fast on bread and water, followed by precautionary administration of the Last Rites and a Requiem Mass said over the living pilgrim before he entered the cave, in case the devil should snatch him away body and soul before his vigil was over.294 It is hardly surprising that Grissaphan, like so many others, was vouchsafed visions of Heaven and Hell. The prior of Saints Island was delighted, and sent the young man back with a certificate of the genuineness of his pilgrimage and his visions. Grissaphan claimed to be charged with an angelic message for Primate Richard FitzRalph himself, telling him to lift his interdict from ‘a certain great city’ (perhaps Drogheda, where the primate was in dispute with the merchants over tithes). FitzRalph was sufficiently impressed to send the pilgrim to Avignon, with a letter of recommendation to his clerical nephew, Richard FitzRalph the younger, who seems to have made the arrangements for the whole narrative of Grissaphan’s visions to be taken down orally and translated into Latin.295 Once again, the eye-witness account of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory took Europe by storm, but this time the narrative gave some account of the place itself, how to get there, and the helpfulness of the local inhabitants. Death was much in people’s minds in the wake of the great wave of bubonic plague that had wiped out perhaps a third of the population of Europe in 1348–9. It is hardly too much to say that the trip to Loch Derg became fashionable in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and nobles with their retinues and some pilgrims of lower degree made the arduous journey to this Donegal lake from most countries of western and central Europe. Around 1494, an Augustinian canon from the Netherlands was outraged to be charged money for permission to enter the purgatory, quite possibly by Cathal Óc MacManus (d.1498), rural dean of Loch Erne, and administrator of the Clogher diocese during a prolonged vacancy (1494–1502) in the bishopric. The Dutchman was even more outraged when, having paid his money, he failed to experience the famous visions of Heaven and Hell inside the cave, and he sent an unfavourable report to the pope. Possibly as a result of this episode, in 1497 the cave was destroyed in compliance with an order from Pope Alexander VI. 293 Hugh Shields, ‘The French accounts’ in The medieval pilgrimage, pp 83–98. 294 J.-M. Picard and Yolande de Pontfarcy, St Patrick’s Purgatory (Dublin, 1985), p. 50; Carpenter, ‘The pilgrim from Catalonia/Aragon’, pp 112–13; Michael Haren, ‘Two Hungarian pilgrims’ in The medieval pilgrimage, pp 120–68, at pp 160–1. 295 Walsh, A fourteenth-century scholar,

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The Annals of Ulster, which are for these years the work of Cathal Óc MacManus himself, explain blandly that the problem was that this was not the right cave that had been mentioned in the account of ‘the knight Owein’. This formulation, of course, allowed the local church, after a discreet interval, to open up another cave in the neighbourhood as the correct location. The precise details of this restoration are unrecorded, but the pilgrimage continued in the sixteenth century and, in 1517, the shrine was visited by Bishop Francesco Chiericati, papal nuncio to the court of Henry VIII. Although the shrine was by now of greater interest to Irish pilgrims, a few more foreign visits are recorded296 until the Protestant Reformation, and its accompanying religious wars, made the journey to Loch Derg too perilous for Continental Catholics. Written accounts of the medieval pilgrims’ visions were sometimes accompanied by details of their journey to and from the shrine, and these preserve for us today precious glimpses of how the landscape and inhabitants of medieval Ulster looked to an outside observer.297 The comings and goings of these visitors may help to account for the openness to foreign travel and foreign ideas shown by the fifteenth-century Maguire rulers of the otherwise geographically isolated kingdom of Fermanagh, in whose diocese Loch Derg lay.298 Of course, native Irish pilgrims had been visiting Loch Derg and other Irish shrines throughout the medieval period, but the fifteenth century also saw a renewed interest in pilgrimage to foreign shrines. From the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, Rome and the Holy Land had been the most frequently cited goals of Irish pilgrims,299 but in the fifteenth century the shrine of St James, Santiago de Compostela, in northern Spain became more prominent.300 The leading fifteenth-century pilgrim from Ulster was King Tomás Óc Maguire, who by the time he died had been ‘[once] in Rome and twice at the city of St James on his pilgrimage’.301 The ruler of Tír Conaill, Áed Dub O’Donnell, wrote in 1507 to James IV of Scotland that he too had wished to visit the shrine of St James, but had been advised against it by his brehons and counsellors and especially the Observantine friars.302 This deference to the views of the pp 308–18; Haren, ‘Two Hungarian pilgrims’, pp 120–59. 296 Michael Haren, ‘The close of the medieval pilgrimage’ in The medieval pilgrimage, pp 190–201. 297  The medieval pilgrimage; Mary Purcell, ‘St Patrick’s Purgatory: Francesco Chiericati’s letter to Isabella d’Este’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 12:2 (1987), 1–10. 298  Katharine Simms, ‘Medieval Fermanagh’ in Fermanagh Hist. & Soc., pp 77–103, at pp 93–7. 299 Aubrey Gwynn, The Irish church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, ed. Gerard O’Brien (Dublin, 1992), pp 35–8; Gerard Murphy, ‘Two Irish poems written from the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century’, Éigse, 7 (1953–5), 71–9: 71–4; Brian Ó Cuív, ‘Poem on the infancy of Christ’, Éigse, 15 (1973– 4), 93–102. 300 Roger Stalley, ‘Sailing to Santiago’ in J. Bradley (ed.), Settlement and society in medieval Ireland (Kilkenny, 1988), pp 397–420; Michael Haren, ‘Select documents XXXIX: the religious outlook of a Gaelic lord: a new light on Thomas Óg Maguire’, IHS, 25 (1986), 195–7. 301 AU 3, pp 268–9 (AD1480); see Simms, ‘Medieval Fermanagh’, p. 95. 302 Mac Eiteagáin, ‘The Renaissance’, p. 209.

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Observants, which was to be echoed later by Áed Dub’s son Magnus O’Donnell, tends to bear out the justice of a report of the Spanish ambassador to the Emperor Charles V in 1534, that ‘among the wild Irish … these Cordeliers (Observants) are feared, obeyed, and almost adored, not only by the peasants but by the lords who hold them in such reverence as to endure from them blows from a stick’.303 By that date it would seem the vacuum in moral leadership occasioned by the almost perpetual absence of the Anglo-Irish primates from the Gaelic dioceses in Ulster had been filled. The Counter-Reformation was effectively under way here before the Protestant Reformation had even begun.

POPULAR BELIEFS AND SUPERSTITIONS

A striking feature of the Irish church down the ages was its almost uniform adherence to orthodox Catholic theology, famously expressed by St Columbanus: We Irish, inhabitants of the world’s edge, are disciples of Saints Peter and Paul and of all the disciples who wrote the sacred canon by the Holy Ghost, and we accept nothing outside the evangelical and apostolic teaching; none has been a heretic, none a Judaizer, none a schismatic; but the Catholic Faith, as it was delivered by you first, who are the successors of the holy apostles, is maintained unbroken.304 This orthodoxy of belief was to persist, somewhat surprisingly, since so many background circumstances in Irish society might have been expected to foster theological differences of opinion. In Columbanus’ own day, and for a century thereafter, Irish churchmen proved themselves notoriously reluctant to bow to outside authority, even to that of the pope, on the subject of the date of Easter and the shape of their clerical tonsure.305 They lacked effective central control, either clerical or secular, and this situation continued after the incomplete AngloNorman conquest. From a very early date, vernacular versions of Scripture were in circulation among them, versions which were interlarded with apocryphal material. These were the kind of pre-conditions that had led to heresy elsewhere in Europe. Even the medieval colonists were surprised by the orthodoxy of their Gaelic neighbours. As Henry Christede told the French chronicler Froissart about his work as an interpreter for the Gaelic chieftains, during Richard II’s expedition to Ireland in 1395: 303 Ó Clabaigh, The Franciscans in Ireland, pp 78, 156–7. 304 G.S.M. Walker (ed.), Sancti Columbani opera (Dublin, 1957, repr., 1970), p. 39. 305 Hughes, The church in early Irish society, pp 103–10; T.M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2000), pp 391–415; Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, Early medieval Ireland, 400–1200 (London and New York, 1995), pp 152–3, 161, 201.

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I once made enquiry concerning their faith; but they seemed so much displeased, I was forced to silence: they said they believed in God and the Trinity, without any difference from our creed. I asked which pope they were inclined to: they replied, without hesitation, ‘To that at Rome’.306 Christede’s questions may seem strange, given that the single diocese of Armagh embraced both the colonists of Louth and the Great O’Neill, but there had been instances of Lollardy among the native Welsh in the previous decade,307 and the Great Western Schism (1378–1409) between Urbanist and Clementist popes was in full swing at the time. Heresies in the rest of Europe, during the high Middle Ages, tended to originate either from the eastern Mediterranean, for example Catharism and Satanism (or ritual magic), or in the more daring speculations of scholastic theologians, such as Berengar of Tours (d.1088).308 They were thus associated with trading towns and universities, both markedly absent from Gaelic Ireland, especially from Ulster. In addition, the general lack of supervision from central authority, and laisser faire attitude to such matters as clerical celibacy, may have allowed occasional theological eccentricities in individuals to pass unnoticed in the Armagh province. Lambert has remarked: ‘It takes two to create a heresy: the heretic with his dissident beliefs and practices; and the Church to condemn his views and to define what is orthodox doctrine’.309 Such native Irish heretics as are recorded in the medieval period were located in Munster and Leinster.310 The Irish, of course, retained a vivid belief in fairies, and continued to do so into the twentieth century.311 The people of the síd (‘of the fairy mounds’) were seen as a race of immortal beings supposed to have dominated Ireland in a period before the arrival of the Milesian Gaels, who then continued their existence 306 Johnes, Froissart, 2, p. 530. 307 John Davies, A history of Wales (London, 1994), p. 193. 308 See M.D. Lambert, Medieval heresy: popular movements from Bogomil to Hus (London, 1977), pp xvi, 32–5, 43, 60; Norman Cohn, Europe’s inner demons (London, 1993), pp 102– 43; Gordon Leff, Heresy in the later Middle Ages: the relation of heterodoxy to dissent, c.1250– c.1450 (Manchester, 1967). Lambert, while conceding that towns were important in communicating heresies, makes the point that the role of the urban middle class in heretical movements has been exaggerated and identifies many references to heresies among peasants in the course of the eleventh century – Lambert, op. cit., pp xiii–xiv, 357–65. 309 Lambert, Medieval heresy, p. 4. This view is echoed by Leff, Heresy in the later Middle Ages, pp 1–2. 310 Aubrey Gwynn and D.F. Gleeson, A history of the diocese of Killaloe I (Dublin, 1962), pp 365–7; Anne Neary, ‘The origins and character of the Kilkenny witchcraft case of 1324’, PRIA, 83C (1983), 333–50; Burrows, ‘Fifteenth-century Irish provincial legislation and pastoral care’, pp 62–3; Gerard Murphy, ‘Eleventh- or twelfth-century Irish doctrine concerning the Real Presence’ in J.A. Watt, J.B. Morrall and F.X. Martin (eds), Medieval studies presented to Aubrey Gwynn SJ (Dublin, 1961), pp 19–28; Gilbert, Chart. St Mary’s, 2, p. 366. 311 Lady Gregory, Visions and beliefs in the West of Ireland (London and New York, 1920); T.G.F. Paterson, Country cracks: old tales from the county Armagh (Dundalk, 1943); Patricia Lysaght, The banshee: the Irish supernatural death-messenger (Dun Laoghaire, 1986).

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underground in the fairy mounds, emerging from time to time to interact with the human race. Some were ‘domesticated’ as benign guardian spirits of certain dynasties, like the O’Briens and O’Conors.312 Some were capricious, capable of both blessings and curses, depending on whether their demands were satisfied, like the band of fairy poets who encountered MacSweeney of Fanad on a hunting-trip.313 Others were death-dealing. The slúag síde, a vision of the fairy host riding out to war, was perceived as an omen of disaster. Giraldus Cambrensis relates that the Cambro-Norman invaders were assailed by such a vision (or sound experience, as it was night-time) as a result of camping overnight in a deserted rath.314 The friar Tomás Ó Cuinn (d.1278), later bishop of Clonmacnois, preached defiance against the fairy hosts, because peasants in Clonfert diocese who had such visions immediately returned to their houses to lie down and die.315 A touching poem in the Lebar Brecc seems to equate a visitation of the plague or some other epidemic infection with the invisible arrows of the slúag síde, which had deprived the poet of his wife and children.316 Bardic eulogies, on the theme of a king’s army mustering for war, exult in the idea that the human army is preceded by wraiths of the fairy host (taidbsi catha, siabartha síthe) because the sight of these was an omen of death for the enemy, and ensured victory to the army that followed them.317 For the educated poets, fairies may have been simply a figure of speech, as Christian poets in the Middle Ages and early modern period used the concepts of Venus and Cupid, Mars and Jove as personifications of abstract ideas of love, war and kingship. However, the eleventh-century scholar Flann Mainistrech, or his medieval continuator, was clearly worried that, for some Irishmen, belief in the existence of the ‘people of the mounds’ posed a danger to their faith: The Tuatha Dé Danann, a company like to crystal, Though men of false learning say here That the people of ships and of drinking beakers Are in Tír Tairngire [‘Land of Promise’, ‘Otherworld’]318

312 Brian Ó Cuív, ‘A poem of prophecy on Ua Conchobair kings of Connacht’, Celtica, 19 (1987), 31–54.; Lysaght, The banshee, pp 53–63, 255–81. 313 Breatnach, Leabhar Chlainne Suibhne, pp 33–7. 314 Scott & Martin, Expugnatio, pp 38–9. 315 J.A. Watt, The church in medieval Ireland (2nd ed., Dublin, 1998), pp 76–7. 316 Eleanor Knott, An introduction to Irish syllabic poetry of the period 1200–1600 (2nd ed., Dublin, 1957), pp 29–30. 317 Katharine Simms, ‘Images of warfare in bardic poetry, Celtica, 21 (1990), 608–19: 615; Evelyn Mullally, ‘The phantom army of 1169: an Anglo-Norman view’, Éigse, 31 (1999), 89–101. 318 RIA Dictionary, p. 574; see John Carey, ‘The location of the Otherworld in Irish tradition’, Éigse, 19:1 (1982), 36–43; Tomás Ó Cathasaigh, ‘The semantics of síd’, Éigse, 17:2 (1977–8), 137–55.

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The ‘Tír Tairngire’ here spoken of Which the Tuatha Dé Danann have, – It is the ever-narrow steading wherein is judgement; It is the lowest Hell. Though they say here in various ways, False men of history, That the people of the curses, of the dwellings, were síd-folk, The belief is displeasing to Christ. Whoso believes in his heart That they are thus in síd-mounds, He shall not inhabit Heaven of the Powers, For the cause that it is no truth to which he hearkeneth.319 The argument here is not that the Tuatha Dé are demons themselves, rather that they were mortal men living before the coming of Christianity, and as pagans they went to Hell, and it is a sin to believe otherwise. However, as discussed in Chapter 1 above,320 many other Christian seanchaide – ‘false men of history’ – explained the Tuatha Dé in neo-platonic terms as immortal beings living under God’s supreme authority. Belief in the power of the ‘Evil Eye’, widespread throughout Europe, was strong in Gaelic Ireland also, and was a reason for the constant blessings people showered on each other as they met and parted, as they entered a house or passed by a worker in the field. If crops being sown at the time one passed by were later to fail, or yield a poor harvest, one could not be blamed – or still worse, legally sued – for ill-wishing the sower if one had blessed him aloud at the time.321 Because the Evil Eye was seen as a telepathic force for harm caused by envy, poets sometimes used the concept as a back-handed compliment. A lady should beware, they suggest, because her excessive beauty and fame caused other women to wish her ill.322 Ill-wishing could also involve ‘poisonous spits’ as part of the spell.323 A love-charm (bricht seirce), on the other hand, was seen as relatively harmless. The early ‘Penitential of Finnian’ laid down:

319 R.A.S. Macalister (ed.), Lebor Gabála Érenn: the Book of the Taking of Ireland (5 vols, Dublin, ITS, 1938–56), 4, pp 130–1, 241. 320 Above, pp 62–3. 321 Jacqueline Borsje and Fergus Kelly, ‘“The Evil Eye” in early Irish literature and law’, Celtica, 24 (2003), 1–39: 2, 36. 322 Tadhg Ó Donnchadha (ed.), Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe (Dublin, IMC, 1931), p. 208; Seán Mac Airt (ed.), Leabhar Branach, the Book of the O’Byrnes (Dublin, 1944), p. 228. 323 Borsje and Kelly, ‘“The Evil Eye”’, p. 32 note 202.

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The greater sin in this case seems to have been the intention to seduce someone against their will, rather than the practice of magic itself. Love charms and cures for love charms may be found in Irish medical texts from the high Middle Ages,325 and a poetic eulogy of Bishop Eoin Cuilleannáin of Raphoe, in the seventeenth century, humorously accused him of casting a ‘love charm’ over his flock.326 The rare references to witches, of the kind persecuted in the rest of Europe, are associated with the Anglo-Irish of Leinster. The case of the fourteenthcentury Dame Alice Kyteler and her handmaid Petronilla of Meath is wellknown,327 and soon after there was an accusation that Sir William de Bermingham and his son Walter were using witchcraft to escape from their prison in Dublin Castle.328 Again in the sixteenth century, Sir Barnaby Fitzpatrick complained that his Anglo-Irish step-mother was trying to assassinate him by means of witchcraft,329 but only the Kyteler case is known to have resulted in a witch-burning. Gaelic Irish attitudes to ‘wise women’ seem to have been rather different. The ‘First Synod of Patrick’, variously dated to the sixth or early seventh century, contained a decree that: A Christian who believes that there is such a thing in the world as a vampire (lamia), that is to say, a witch (striga), is to be anathematized – anyone who puts a living soul under such a reputation; and he must not be received again into the Church before he has undone by his own word the crime that he has committed, and so does penance with all diligence.330 324 Ludwig Bieler (ed.), The Irish penitentials (Dublin, 1963), pp 78–9. 325 O’Grady & Flower, Cat. Ir. MSS, 2, p. 631; R.I. Best (ed.), ‘Some Irish charms’, Ériu, 16 (1952), 27–32: 29; Winifred Wulff (ed.), ‘Contra incantationes’, Ériu, 12 (1934–8), 250–3. See also eadem, ‘De amore hereos’, Ériu, 11 (1932), 174–81, a cure for natural love-sickness. 326  John MacErlean, ‘Eoin Ó Cuileannáin, bishop of Raphoe 1625–61’, Archivium Hibernicum, 1 (1912), 77–121: 98–100, 118–21. 327 L.S. Davidson and J.O. Ward (trans.), The sorcery trial of Alice Kyteler: a contemporary account (1324) together with related documents in English translation (Binghamton, New York, 1993); Thomas Wright (ed.), A contemporary narrative of the proceedings against Dame Alice Kyteler, prosecuted for sorcery in 1324, by Richard de Ledrede, bishop of Ossory (London, 1843); Neary, ‘The origins and character’. 328 P.M. Connolly, ‘An attempted escape from Dublin Castle: the trial of William and Walter de Bermingham, 1332’, IHS, 29 (1994), 100–8. 329 Ciarán Brady, The chief governors: the rise and fall of reform government in Tudor Ireland, 1536–1588 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 288. 330 Bieler, The Irish

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As with Flann Mainistrech’s view of the Tuatha Dé, the logic here seems to be that there are no such things as witches, and so the sin lies in believing that there are. Once again, however, opinion among the Irish churchmen seems to have been divided. The Collectio Canonum Hibernensium, the Irish collection of canon laws compiled c.AD720, lays down that a just king does not pay heed to the superstitions of druids, sorceresses or fortune-tellers (magorum et pythonissarum et auguriorum).331 The Middle Irish text Aided Crimthann even relays the startling information that Mugain the stepmother of Niall of the Nine Hostages was a great witch, and that foolish women and peasants still sacrifice to her on Hallowe’en,332 which gives her rather the character of a malign divinity than a mortal witch. There are references to enchantresses (concionatrices) or ‘women of power’ (banntracht cumachta) in the Latin and Irish Lives of St Berach respectively, where the action is set in the missionary period in Ireland, but the Irish Life, in particular, is likely to be a composition of the later medieval period.333 Bardic poems from the high Middle Ages contain references to mná mana, women fortune-tellers, to a class of person described as a cailleoir or prognosticator (‘astrologer’?) and to banfháidi, ‘prophetesses’, who are described as reading the shapes of clouds, the winds, the patterns made by clothes-moths, and the onset of sneezing.334 Some of these references imply that these are quite acceptable occupations,335 and others that these people are engaged in nonChristian activities. The approving references tend to be late, and to refer to historical or mythical events, while a disapproving allusion in the early thirteenth century implies that such seers are currently at work.336 In 1561, the English apothecary Thomas Smith was to claim that the most learned of the bardic poets, the filid, were ‘great mayntayners of whitches and other vile matters; to the great blasfemye of God and to the great impoverishinge of the comenwealthe’.337 There is no evidence from Irish sources for such a connection. Other English penitentials, pp 56–7. 331 See Whitley Stokes (ed.), The tripartite Life of Patrick with other documents relating to that saint (2 vols, London, 1887), 2, p. 507; McCone, Pagan past, p. 139; F.W.H. Wasserschleben (ed.), Die irische Kanonensammlung (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1885), no. XXV, 4. 332 Whitley Stokes (ed.), ‘The death of Crimthann son of Fidach and the adventures of the sons of Eochaid Muigmedón’, Revue Celtique, 24 (1903), 170–207: 176–9. 333 Charles Plummer (ed.), Vitae sanctorum Hiberniae (2 vols, Oxford, 1910) 1, pp 78–9; idem (ed.), Bethada náem nÉrenn (2 vols, Oxford, 1922), 1, p. 30; 2, p. 29. 334 On prognostications based on sneezing see James Carney (ed.), ‘M’aenarán dam isa sliab’, Éigse, 2:2 (1940), 107–13: 113. 335 E.C. Quiggin, ‘O’Conor’s house at Cloonfree’ in E.C. Quiggin (ed.), Essays and studies presented to William Ridgeway (Cambridge, 1913), pp 333–52, at pp 346–7; James Carney (ed.), Poems on the Butlers (Dublin, 1945), pp 60–1; J.G. O’Keeffe (ed.), ‘Poems on the O’Donnells’, Ir. Texts II, p. 53 verses 25–7; Knott, Tadhg Dall, no. 18, verse 6; DiD, no. 93, verses 39–40. 336 ABM, no. 116, verses 21–23. See Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 26–7, where I suggest the date of composition as AD1224; see also Aithd., poem 4, verse 14, for contrast between pagan and Christian prophecies. On early thirteenth-century hints of paganism see above, pp 291, 294–5. 337 H.F. Hore, ‘Irish bardism in 1561’, UJA, 1st ser., 6 (1858), 165–7, 202– 12: 166–7.

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sixteenth-century authors, such as Sir Philip Sidney and Shakespeare, refer to the Irish rhymers’ boasted power to kill a man or animal by their poetic satires, and in particular their reputed ability to rhyme mice and rats to death. By the seventeenth century such Irish rhymers were listed among those who cast the evil eye in Reginald Scot’s Discovery of witchcraft (1665).338

338 F.N. Robinson, ‘Satirists and enchanters in early Irish literature’ in David G. Lyon and George F. Moore (eds), Studies in the history of religions presented to Crawford Howell Troy (New York, 1912), pp 95–130, reprinted in John Matthews (ed.), The bardic source book (London, 1998), pp 134–58, at pp 134–5.

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CHAPTER

9

Ulster poets

E A R LY P O E T S A N D T H E S U P E R N AT U R A L

The maintenance of an ancient and privileged class of professional praise-poets is perhaps the single most distinctive feature of Gaelic society in Ireland and Scotland in the later Middle Ages. It was a distinction that had earlier been shared by the Welsh, and still earlier by the Continental Celts. Posidonius of Apamea (c.135–50BC) wrote descriptions of Gaulish society in his own day which have since been lost, but extracts have been partially relayed to us by later Classical authors such as Diodorus Siculus (fl. 60–30BC) and Strabo (fl. 64BC– AD21).1 According to Diodorus: ‘[The Gauls] have also lyric poets whom they call Bards (bardoi). They sing to the accompaniment of instruments resembling lyres, sometimes a eulogy and sometimes a satire’.2 Other Classical writers contribute details indicating that the bards sang in praise of aristocratic warrior lords, and were richly rewarded for this service.3 Bardoi or bardi are represented as one of the three privileged groups in Gaulish society who were neither warriors nor peasants, the others being druids (druides) and seers (manteis, ouateis or vates).4 The druids officiated at sacrifices, and the seers foretold the future, but the poets are not explicitly described as having a religious or magical role, although Diodorus associates the ‘song-loving poets’ with druids as having the moral authority to intervene between warring armies and restore peace.5 Julius Caesar, on the other hand, as conqueror of Gaul, may not have been so dependent on Posidonius for his information. He referred to a single privileged class of druids who had their own schools and passed on their learning to their students in verse form, being reluctant to use writing for this purpose, although Gauls wrote in their own language using the Greek alphabet for ordinary secular business.6 It is possible Caesar included seers and poets under the general heading of ‘druids’ and thus saw poets in a quasi-religious light. 1  J.J. Tierney, ‘The Celtic ethnography of Posidonius’, PRIA, 60C (1960), 189–275. 2 Diodorus Siculus, Lib. 5, cap. 31, quoted in Tierney, ‘The Celtic ethnography’, 251. 3 J.E. Caerwyn Williams, The court poet in medieval Ireland (London, 1971), p. 15 (quoting Festus and Ammianus Marcellinus); Tierney, ‘The Celtic ethnography’, 248. 4 Strabo, Lib. 4, pars 4, cap. 4 (Tierney, ‘The Celtic ethnography’, 269); David Rankin, Celts and the Classical world (London, 1996), pp 271–4. 5  Diodorus Siculus, Lib. 5, cap. 31 (Tierney, ‘The Celtic ethnography’, 251). 6 Caesar, De bello Gallico, Lib. 6, cap. 13–14 (Tierney, ‘The Celtic

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An Ogam inscription in Primitive Irish (late fourth to early fifth century AD) commemorates an Irishman described as ‘velitas’, perhaps equivalent to the later word fili, a term for a learned poet.7 Apart from this, the first written references to professional poets in Ireland come in the late seventh-century Latin Life of St Patrick by Muirchú, and in some Old Irish law tracts composed shortly afterwards. Muirchú states at the outset that he wrote his Life of Patrick for Bishop Áed of Sletty. Sletty was a church in Leinster said to be founded by St Fíacc and, according to Muirchú, Fiacc was a poet in his youth before he became converted to Christianity and was ordained a bishop. Not surprisingly, therefore, poets are treated kindly in Muirchú’s account of pagan Irish society. When his narrative brings Patrick to meet the high-king Lóegaire at Tara, the king is surrounded by wizards, necromancers and fortune-tellers, but only the court poet, Dubthach moccu Lugair, steps forward to greet Patrick and willingly accept the new religion.8 A passage of roscad, or alliterative verse in archaic style, which forms part of the eighth-century section of the ‘pseudo-historical prologue’ to the Senchas Már, the most comprehensive collection of Old Irish law, refers to this Dubthach moccu Lugair as inspired by God’s Holy Spirit like a prophet of the Old Testament to voice a divine judgement in a dispute between Patrick and Lóegaire over the slaying of Patrick’s charioteer.9 The idea that poets were possessed of supernatural powers is also found in the Coire Goiriath (‘the Caldron of Poesy’), an Old Irish tract on poetic inspiration, and in the law text Bretha Nemed, both probably dating to the eighth century, and in another early tract: ‘The Primer of the [Poets’] Stipulations’ (Uraicecht na Riar). The powers in question were said to be divination or ‘second sight’, described as ‘the knowledge that illuminates’ (imbas for-osna), and the ability to inflict harm and death through satire (áer), particularly the severest kind of satire, glám dícenn.10 As in the case of beliefs concerning the people of the síd-mounds and fortunetellers, opinion among early Irish schoolmen was divided on the subject of the poet’s powers of imbas for-osna. For some, poetic talent itself was a gift of the Holy Spirit, and while the secular poet at the summit of his profession might blamelessly attain the ‘knowledge that illuminates’ by consuming the ‘hazel-nuts of wisdom’ found floating up the river Boyne once every seven years, the ordained cleric with poetic inspiration and gifts of prophecy, such as were attributed to St Colm Cille, was even more admirable.11 However, Bishop ethnography’, 271–2). 7 Damian McManus, A guide to Ogam (Maynooth, 1991), pp 52, 94, 171 note 21. 8 Bieler, The Patrician texts, pp 62–3, 84–5, 92–3. 9 Kim McCone, ‘Dubthach Maccu Lugair, and a matter of life and death in the pseudo-historical prologue to the Senchas Már’, Peritia, 5 (1986), 1–35; idem, Pagan past, pp 90–2, 96–8. 10 John Carey, ‘The three things required of a poet’, Ériu, 48 (1997), 41–58; Liam Breatnach, ‘The Caldron of Poesy’, Ériu, 32 (1981), 45–93: 56, 66–9; idem, Uraicecht na Ríar: the poetic grades in early Irish law (Dublin, 1987), pp 114–15, 140. 11 Breatnach, ‘The Caldron of Poesy’, 66–9.

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Cormac mac Cuilennáin (d.908) and the anonymous author of Dúil Dromma Cetta, although they considered the poet’s powers of second sight as real, held that they were gained by pagan ritual and the invocation of demons and were therefore incompatible with Christianity.12 Thurneysen came to the conclusion that, by the time Bishop Cormac was writing, about AD900, nobody actually performed the ritual of imbas for-osna to acquire prophetic powers any longer, leaving the bishop free to invent details of the ritual, like the need to prepare by consuming the raw flesh of a dog, that might be sufficiently off-putting to discourage any poet from attempting to revive the custom.13 Even the more positive account in the ‘Caldron of Poesy’, which describes imbas for-osna as acquired by a master-poet who consumed hazel-nuts of wisdom, would also lead the reader to conclude that this was not a description of contemporary practice. The vaunted power of the poet’s satire to bring about misfortune and death was a different matter, however. This reputation continued in one form or another as long as there were professional poets in Irish society. As late as the fifteenth century, a number of deaths of prominent people are attributed by the annalists to a ‘poetic miracle’, that is, to divine retribution for attacks made on poets and, in one such entry, the retribution is explicitly described as drawn down on the victim by poetic satires.14 Once more we find that, as in the case of imbas for-osna, views on satire were divided in the pre-reform church schools, but this time there was no disagreement in principle. Satire uttered for just cause by a noble and learned poet was considered a meritorious proclamation of God’s judgement against a sinner, comparable to excommunication and anathema by a cleric.15 A twelfth-century poem, embedded in the Second Life of St M’Áedóc, patron of Ferns (county Wexford) and Drumlane (county Cavan), threatens any inhabitants of Fir Manach who fail to pay their church dues to Drumlane with ‘Some of the clergy making satires on them all, others of the clergy cursing them’.16 In 1539, we find that the satires of O’Donnell’s poets are added to the excommunications of senior clerics as sanctions to prevent any breach of an agreement drawn up between Magnus O’Donnell and Tadc O’Conor Sligo concerning the garrisoning of Sligo Castle.17 12 Carey, ‘The three things required of a poet’, 48–9. 13 Rudolf Thurneysen, ‘Imbas for osndai’, ZCP, 19 (1933), 163–4. 14 Ann. Conn., pp 376–7, 422–3 (AD1400, 1414); AU 3, pp 396–7 (AD1495). 15 See Kim McCone, ‘A tale of two ditties: poet and satirist in Cath Maige Tuired’ in Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Liam Breatnach and Kim McCone (eds), Sages, saints and storytellers:Celtic studies in honour of Professor James Carney (Maynooth, 1989), pp 122–43; Tomás Ó Cathasaigh, ‘Curse and satire’ Éigse, 21 (1986), 10–15; Liam Breatnach, ‘On satire and the poet’s circuit’, in Cathal G. Ó Háinle and Donald Meek (eds), Unity in diversity: studies in Irish and Scottish Gaelic language, literature and history (Dublin, 2004), pp 25–35. See also Róisín McLaughlin, Early Irish satire (Dublin, 2008). 16 Plummer, Bethada Náem nÉrenn, 1, p. 250; 2, p. 242. The word here translated as ‘clergy’ is clíar, which can mean either clerics or poets, just as the word ‘clerk’ in English can be applied to a lay scribe or a cleric. See Simms, ‘Frontiers in the Irish church’, p. 192. 17 Maura Carney (ed.), ‘Agreement

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On the other hand, satire by a professional satirist, known as a dul or cáinte, when uttered against innocent members of the public, either to assist a war-band to victory by weakening their enemies, or as a method of extorting wealth by instilling victims with fear of threatened satire, was an art opposed to God. The Old Irish law tract dealing with the level of maintenance due to various persons on their sick-bed, Bretha Crólige, states: There are three persons in the tuath who are maintained at the maintenance of a bóaire [a commoner] – neither their dignity nor their nemed-status nor their rights nor their tonsure increases their sickmaintenance: druid, fían-brigand and satirist (druí, díbergach, cáinte). For it is more fitting in God’s sight to spurn them than to support them.18 As McCone points out, the implication here is that the cáinte, the druid and the fían member traditionally claimed a higher status in society than the churcheducated jurist was willing to accord to them, since he held that they followed professions incompatible with Christianity.

P O E T S A N D T H E P R E - R E F O R M C H U RC H S C H O O L S

The Latin canon law text known as ‘The First Synod of Patrick’ or Synodus Episcoporum is of uncertain date, though there is a certain consensus of opinion pointing to the sixth or at latest early seventh century as the time of its compilation.19 It belongs to a period before Irish customary law had come under the control of the church. Among a number of other decrees concerning the avoidance of pagan legal customs, one clause states: ‘A Christian whom someone has wronged and who calls that person to court, and not to the Church, for the case to be tried, he who does this shall be a stranger’.20 This situation was to change by the late seventh century, when the first written Old Irish law texts show heavy ecclesiastical influence.21 The astonishingly comprehensive collection between Ó Domhnaill and Tadhg Ó Conchubhair concerning Sligo Castle (23 June 1539)’ IHS, 3 (1942/3), 282–96: 286. 18 McCone, ‘A tale of two ditties’, p. 128. This provides a fresh translation of D.A. Binchy (ed.), ‘Bretha Crólige’, Ériu, 12 (1934–8), 1–77: 40, which takes account of Donnchadh Ó Corráin’s suggested translation of ‘cendgelt’ as ‘tonsure’ (in lecture delivered to DIAS Tionól, November 1982). See also Kim McCone, ‘Aided Celtchair maic Uthecair: hounds, heroes and hospitallers in early Irish myth and story’, Ériu, 35 (1984), 1–30: 28–9, and idem, ‘Werewolves, cyclopes, díberga and fíanna: juvenile delinquency in early Ireland’, CMCS, 12 (Winter 1986), 1–22: 3. The words in square brackets are mine. 19 Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, pp 245–7. 20 Bieler, The Irish penitentials, p. 57, clause no. 21; see also clauses 8, 14, 20, 22, 31. 21 Liam Breatnach, ‘The ecclesiastical element in the Old-Irish legal tract Cáin Fhuithirbe’, Peritia, 5 (1986), 36–52; idem, ‘Canon law and secular law in early Ireland: the significance of Bretha Nemed’, Peritia, 3 (1984),

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of vernacular law tracts known as the Senchas Már, or ‘the Great Tradition’, compiled before the mid-eighth century, claimed in its introduction to represent the body of Irish inherited law as purified by St Patrick, the saint having deleted from it all customs incompatible with Christianity.22 A similar time-frame saw the church extend its influence over much of the poetic order in Irish society. A close study of the early vernacular tracts on customary law and the poets has led Breatnach to the conclusion that, before about AD700, poets were seen as a single profession, ranked in six classes. These ranged from the dul, and drisiuc, at the lower end of the scale, who were both types of satirist, and could claim food and lodging for themselves alone. Above these came the bard, the lowest grade entitled to bring a small retinue with him, the admall, who could act as praise-poet to the king, the lethcerd who was a learned poet and, at the summit of his profession, the fili, suí or dean, who was traditionally distinguished by his command of imbas for-osna (the power of divination), an ability to chant poems extempore, and a command of the four most prized poetic metres. The lethcerd, or ‘half-poet’ was so called because his remuneration was half that of the fili, the admall earned a quarter fee, the bard a sixth and the dul a tenth, according to an early recension of the Bretha Nemed.23 However, a re-organization of this system, which could not have happened much before the early eighth century, divided the poetic order into two, between literate and non-literate poets.24 In the tract Uraicecht na Riar, and subsequent law tracts and commentaries influenced by its teaching, all literate poets were accounted filid and were divided into seven orders, corresponding to the seven orders of the clergy. They were conceived of as normally coming from the same social class by birth, and differentiated from each other only on the basis of their progress in learning. They ranged from the lowest grade of fochloc or novice poet, through the grades of macfhuirmid, dos, cano, and clí, to ánruth, the fully qualified poet, and ollam, the head of poetry in a particular tuath. The ollam filed, or master poet, was originally seen as occupying an office rather than a rank. His honour-price was equal to that of a bishop, or the king of a tuath, and just as there could be only one bishop in a diocese at any one time, or one king over a tuath, so the expectation was that each tuath would have only one ollam,25 most naturally viewed as the head of a resident poetic family. The fili’s son loses his claim to noble status after his father’s death, unless he too studies poetry, or at least demonstrates a talent for verse-making without study, in which case he could claim the lesser status of a bard.26

439–59; McCone, Pagan past, p. 23. 22  Breatnach, Companion, pp 268–314, 338, 344; McCone, Pagan past, pp 96–100. 23 Breatnach, Uraicecht na Ríar, pp 34–5, 39–40, 99. On the evidence for dating this recension of Bretha Nemed to c.AD721–42 see Breatnach, ‘Canon law and secular law’. 24 Breatnach, Uraicecht na Riar, pp 97–8, 100. 25 Ibid., pp 81–94, 102. 26 Ibid., pp 106–7.

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After the eighth century, the term ‘bard’ came to apply to a miscellaneous assortment of poets who practised their art without the kind of literary study pursued in church schools. Some of these oral bards were regarded by churchmen as reprehensible. Feasts given to ‘jesters, satirists and beggar-poets (drúthaib 7 cáintib 7 oblairib)’ were the work of the devil, according to the lawtract Córus Béscnai.27 Others enjoyed an acknowledged status in secular society as professional praise-poets. The bóbard was equated with the ordinary landowner (bóaire), the bard áine gained additional status from belonging to a hereditary bardic family, the tuathbard was acknowledged as serving the local tuath, the admall performed for both the tuath and the king, while the terms tigernbard and rígbard described aristocrats and reigning chieftains who had a talent for composing verse without formal study of written learning.28 It is increasingly acknowledged that all Old Irish material that has come down to us in written form was the product of the church schools, whether written by actual ecclesiastics or by church-educated scholars.29 The incorporation of the traditional learning of the filid into the curriculum of these schools has resulted in an unusual wealth of early Irish customary law, myths and genealogies being preserved in writing to this day, but the texts have been selected and shaped by a pervasive ecclesiastical viewpoint, whose influence has been noted at various points in this and earlier chapters in relation to the compilation of customary law tracts, genealogies and the pseudo-history of the successive invasions through which Ireland was said to have become populated.30 The decision as to which early verse compositions would be written down for posterity seems to have been equally selective. We have an extensive body of written texts of poems, and instructive tracts on the composition of poetry, surviving from the seventhto the twelfth-century period, either in manuscripts of the twelfth century itself or in later medieval and early modern transcripts.31 Yet almost none of these extant texts are poems directly composed in praise of kings and chiefs. Historical and genealogical poems written to enhance the fame of a certain king’s ancestors or predecessors in office, or poems on the lore of place-names (dindshenchas) written to cast a mythical glamour over a place associated with a particular king’s rule, may end with some complimentary verses addressed to the learned author’s patron,32 but these texts were preserved in scholarly anthologies for the sake of 27  McCone, ‘A tale of two ditties’, p. 127. 28  Breatnach, Uraicecht na Riar, pp 52–6. 29 McCone, Pagan past, p. 1; T.M. Charles-Edwards, ‘The context and uses of literacy in early Christian Ireland’ in Huw Pryce (ed.), Literacy in medieval Celtic societies (Cambridge, 1998), pp 62–82; Liam Breatnach, ‘Lawyers in early Ireland’ in Daire Hogan and W.N. Osborough (eds), Brehons, serjeants and attorneys (Dublin, 1990), pp 1–13, at pp 4–5. 30 Above, pp 61–4, 250–1. 31 Liam Breatnach, ‘Poets and poetry’ in Kim McCone and Katharine Simms (eds), Progress in medieval Irish studies (Maynooth, 1996), pp 65–77. 32 Edward Gwynn (ed.), The Metrical Dindshenchas (5 vols, Dublin, 1903–35), 1, pp 44–5, 52–3; 3, pp 34–9, 310–13; 4, pp 52–7, 68–9, 100–1, 160–3, 344–7; R.A.S. Macalister (ed.), Lebor Gabála Érenn: the Book of

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the information they contain, and not for the verses eulogising the patron, and they lie buried among other similar learned poems that may well have been  composed with the same complimentary intention, but lack explicit identification of the patron who was to benefit by the recollection of his famous antecedents. Gerard Murphy drew attention to two poems surviving from the early period that do consist purely of personal praise, one extolling a ninth-century Leinster king called Áed, the other eulogizing the eleventh-century Armagh bishop and historian, Áed Ó Foirréid (d.1056). He was struck by how different these compositions were in style from the learned Old and Middle Irish poems on history, genealogy and place-names, and how similar their style was to the abundant body of praise-poems extant from the Classical Irish period (c.AD1200–1650). His conclusion was that, before c.AD1200, praise-poetry was mainly produced by the illiterate bards rather than the learned filid, and that consequently their poems had not been recorded in writing. He considered the two exceptional poems he had noted were either pastiche imitations of the bardic style by a learned fili, or products of unusually literate bards. Since Classical Irish poems of the high Middle Ages, while continuing the metre and complimentary themes of the two earlier eulogies, also contain learned references to history, genealogy and place-names, Murphy argued that the learned filid had been forced to abandon their academic vocation and earn their living as court poets in the wake of the social upheavals caused by the Norman invasion of Ireland, so that, from the thirteenth century onwards, the two classes of bard and fili became effectively one, the learned praise-poet of Gaelic society in the later Middle Ages.33 Murphy had taken as his starting point a hypothesis that the early filid were successors to the Celtic vates or ‘seers’, a completely different order in origin from the bards, and this view has since been contradicted by Breatnach’s study showing a unified early bardic order with the fili as its top rank. However, Murphy’s view, that after AD1200 there was no longer a split between two poetic orders of filid and baird, receives confirmation from a number of details. For example, Brian Magauran’s poet in the late thirteenth century refers to himself as both bard and file.34 While the authors of late medieval eulogies habitually call themselves filid in their poems, the annalists almost invariably apply the more neutral term fir dána, ‘men of the poetic gift’, ‘professional poets’.35 The the Taking of Ireland (5 vols, Dublin, ITS, 1938–56) 5, pp 562–3; F.J. Byrne, ‘Clann Ollamain Uaisle Emna’, Studia Hibernica, 4 (1964), 54–94: 79–80. 33 Gerard Murphy, ‘Bards and filidh’, Éigse, 2:3 (1940), 200–7; idem, ‘A poem in praise of Aodh Ua Foirréidh, bishop of Armagh (1032–1056)’ in Silvester O’Brien (ed.), Measgra i gcuimhne Mhíchíl Uí Chléirigh (Dublin, 1944), pp 140–64. 34 Lambert McKenna (ed.), The Book of Magauran (Dublin, 1947), poem 6, verses 9, 11. 35 Katharine Simms, ‘An eaglais agus filí na scol’ in Pádraig Ó Fiannachta (eag.), An dán díreach, Léachtaí Cholm Cille 24 (Maigh Nuad, 1994), pp 21–36, at pp 23–5; eadem, ‘Literacy and the Irish bards’ in Huw Pryce (ed.), Literacy in medieval

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surnames of these late medieval fir dána sometimes indicate descent from former bards, as in the cases of the Mac an Bhaird, Ó hAdmaill, and Ó’n Cháinte families, while others share the surnames of learned poets from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, like Ó Cuill and Ó Sléibín.36 Mac Cana has criticized another aspect of Murphy’s article: his view that, before the thirteenth century, composing in praise of kings was in some way regarded as a lesser art, beneath the dignity of the most learned poets and normally left to the bards.37 Breatnach has shown that justified praise by a noble and learned poet counted as solemn testimony establishing a patron’s worth, just as satire voiced divine judgement against him. In this context, the church scholars quoted a verse from the Old Testament, Proverbs 27:21, in a slight variant from the Vulgate: ‘quomodo comprobator argendum in conflatorio et in fornace aurum, sic homo ore laudantis’ (‘as silver is tested in the crucible and gold in the furnace, thus a man in the mouth of one who praises’).38 It is Mac Cana’s contention that many of the short quatrains in praise of kings, quoted as examples of various metres in the Middle Irish tracts on versification, come from longer formal eulogies which were composed by filid as well as bards, but were omitted from the schoolmen’s anthologies devoted to myth and history.39

T H E I M PA C T O F C H U R C H R E F O R M : T H E R I S E O F T H E BARDIC SCHOOLS

Inside the church schools, a shift came about in their curriculum, from mainly Latin studies in the seventh century to an increased emphasis on vernacular learning between the tenth and twelfth centuries, when a number of heads of schools are lauded for their mastery of both ecclesiastical and native secular studies, a shift highlighted by the cumulative evidence from Irish annals published by Richter.40 If we look at the detailed record as it relates to the Celtic societies (Cambridge, 1998), pp 238–58, at pp 241–2. 36 Simms, ‘Literacy and the Irish bards’, p. 245; AFM 2, pp 678–9, 802–3, 824–5, 852–3, 1170–1 (AD958, 1022, 1031, 1048, 1168); ALC 2, pp 206–7 (AD1507); Douglas Hyde, ‘The Book of O’Conor Don’, Ériu, 8:1 (1915), 78–99: 88. 37 Proinsias Mac Cana, ‘Praise poetry in Ireland before the Normans’, Ériu, 54 (2004), 11–40: 32–6. 38 Liam Breatnach, ‘Satire, praise and the early Irish poet’, Ériu, 56 (2006), 63–84: 64. The Vulgate reads similarly quomodo probatur in conflatorio argentum et in fornace aurum sic probatur homo ore laudantis, but translations based on the Hebrew text suggest it is the worth of the praise that is to be tested by the man’s actions – ‘As the fining pot for silver, and the furnace for gold; so is a man to his praise’ (AV). In the translation by An tAth. Ó Fiannachta, ‘Don airgead an breogán, agus don ór an sorn, agus fear le briathra lucht bladair a mheas’, Pádraig Ó Fiannachta (eag.), An Bíobla Naofa (Maigh Nuad, 1981), p. 547. 39 Mac Cana, ‘Praise poetry in Ireland’. Breatnach would however question Mac Cana’s conclusion that the full poems from which the extracts were drawn had not been written down themselves, in manuscripts since lost – Breatnach, ‘Satire, praise and the early Irish poet’, pp 81–2. 40 Michael Richter, ‘The personnel of learning in early medieval

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province of Ulster, the main centres of learning in this region for which scribes, sages or lectors are recorded before the middle of the twelfth century were: first and foremost Armagh, with 34 entries between 725 and 1122, then Bangor with nine entries between 730 and 1016. The Columban monastery on the island of Iona was important in the early period, with four entries between 704 and 935, while Derry had two entries for the years 724 and 937/9, and two possible further references for 1086 and 1095 relating to members of the learned family of Ó Brolcháin. Sites with three references each to the presence of learned personnel before AD1150 were Lough Erne and Devenish, Inishkeen in Monaghan, Clones, Monasterboice and Louth. Sites mentioned twice in this context were Fahan in Inishowen, Downpatrick and Connor, both these latter sites in eastern Ulster coming to the fore in the eleventh century after the references to Bangor had ceased. Errigalkeerogue, Both-Chonais in Inishowen, and Clogher each get a single mention in the ninth century, Coleraine is referred to once in the tenth century and Tory Island in the eleventh.41 A series of Middle Irish poems on the political claims of Tír Conaill, preserved in the Book of Fenagh, suggest that, together with Derry, the church sites of Kilmacrenan (county Donegal) and Drumleene (Clonleigh parish, Raphoe barony, county Donegal) were centres of literary activity in the Irish language in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.42 The rare surviving eleventh-century bardic eulogy that was edited by Gerard Murphy sings the praises not only of Áed Ó Forréid, expert in traditional Irish history and bishop of Armagh, and his overlord, the hereditary lay abbot Amalgaid of Clann Sínaich, but also the lector of the subordinate church of Monasterboice in Louth, Flann Mainistrech (d.1056), described in the annals as ‘great sage of the Irish both in Latin learning and traditional lore (tiugsháoi na n-Gaoidheal etir leigenn 7 sencus)’, ‘the Gaels’ author, both in literature and history and poetry and versification (ughdar Gaidhel etir léighend 7 tshenchus 7 filidecht 7 airchedal)’.43 The eulogy was apparently performed by a bardic troop at a feast attended by all three of these dignitaries, with many other leading members of the ‘congregation of Patrick’ (sámud Pátraic). After extolling the bishop’s ascetic piety, the poem attests to his wide-ranging study of ecclesiastical and lay material, including ‘treatises of kings’: Ireland’ in Próinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter (eds), Irland und Europa im früheren Mittelalter: Bildung und Literatur/Ireland and Europe in the early Middle Ages: learning and literature (Stuttgart, 1996), pp 275–308, at p. 286. See also Simms, ‘Literacy and the Irish bards’, pp 239–40 and 254 note 18; Kim McCone, ‘Zur Frage der Register im frühen Irischen’ in Stephen N. Tranter and Hildegard L.C. Tristram (eds), Early Irish literature: media and communication/ Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit in der frühen irischen Literatur (Tübingen, 1989), pp 57–97, at p. 58 notes 3–8. 41 Richter, ‘The personnel of learning’, pp 290–308. 42 Katharine Simms, ‘The Donegal poems in the Book of Fenagh’, Ériu, 58 (2008), 37–53. 43 See W.M. Hennessy (ed.), Chronicum Scotorum: a chronicle of Irish affairs … to AD1135 (London, 1866), pp 282–3. I am citing the English translation in this case from the late

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages Aodh is the church in which Ireland’s wisdom dwells; he trusts in the study of sacred tomes and books; in his ornamented house men drink mightily; many treatises of kings has he read.44

A similar blending of secular and sacred learning was prevalent in the English and Continental cathedral schools of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, where Roman civil law, medicine and astronomy were studied alongside the sacred scriptures, the Church Fathers and canon law. However, the ongoing church reform encouraged monks and secular clergy alike to re-focus on the salvation of their own souls and those of the congregations under their care, downplaying the value of learning and intellectual speculation for its own sake, and narrowing the curriculum of church schools accordingly. In particular, the Cistercian leader St Bernard, in a sermon to the scholars of Paris in 1139, delivered the opening salvo in the long conflict between monks and scholars, the symbolic start of a bitter struggle between the Cistercians and the masters of Paris that continued for the rest of the century … the recurrent attacks of monks repeatedly forced scholars to defend their learning, as well as their lives [read ‘lifestyles’?], and increased the pressure on scholars to organize both to secure their independence and to regulate their own affairs … The monks were concerned not just with the methods of the schools and the morals of the scholars but, above all, with the growing influence of education.45 Outside Ireland, this divergence of aims was one factor leading to the setting up of universities, or corporate bodies of teachers and students who pursued their studies independently of the monastic or cathedral schools. Inside Ireland, very similar developments took place. St Bernard was delighted to hear that the reforming primate Máel M’Áedóc Ó Morgair, or St Malachy (d.1149), took an aversion to the pursuit of secular learning while a very young student at Armagh: Roused once on a time by the reputation of a certain teacher, famous in the studies which are called liberal, he went to him desiring to learn … But when he went into the house he saw the man playing with an awl, and with rapid strokes making furrows on the wall in some strange fashion. And shocked at the bare sight, because it smacked of levity, the serious boy Gearóid Mac Niocaill’s unpublished translation and partial re-edition of the text (to be viewed on internet at www.ucc.ie/celt/published/G1000 16/index.html); Ann. Tig., 2, p. 289. 44 Murphy, ‘A poem in praise of Aodh Ua Foirréidh’, p. 147. See above, p. 274. 45 S.C. Ferruolo, The origins of the university: the schools of Paris and their critics, 1100–1215 (Stanford, 1985), pp 47–8. My comment in square brackets. See also Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford, 2000), pp 512–18.

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dashed away from him, and did not even care to see him from that time forward.46 St Bernard sees this scene as proof of idle levity on the part of the teacher,47 but this would hardly account for the extreme reaction he describes in the ‘serious boy’. A possible explanation may be that the ‘furrows in the wall’ made by the teacher constituted Ogam lettering, and that Malachy associated this script with paganism, since it features in the sagas as the writing system used by the heroes and villains of pagan times, sometimes for simple messages or memorial inscriptions, but also to convey charms and taboos.48 After the power of the hereditary lay abbots of Armagh had been broken, and Malachy and his reformed successors took control of the primacy, there was a corresponding change of direction away from traditional native studies in the school at Armagh. It was directed for twenty years, from 1154 to 1174, by Flann or Florentius Ó Gormáin (O’Gorman), who had studied for twenty-one years previously in the schools of England and France.49 During his term in office, the Synod of Clane (AD1162) passed the resolution that no-one should hold the position of lector in any church school in Ireland who had not first studied at Armagh.50 The intention was presumably to ensure that the more Latinate and theologically focussed curriculum, that Flann Ó Gormáin would have learned during his studies abroad, would now replace the mixed secular and sacred studies, conducted through the medium of Irish as well as Latin, that had been the norm in Irish church schools hitherto. This pre-eminence of the reformed cathedral school at Armagh was reinforced by the endowment of a lectorship there by the high-king Ruaidri O’Conor in 1169, when he made a perpetual grant of ten cows a year to finance the teaching of students from Ireland and Scotland, effectively abolishing their need to pay school fees.51 The encouragement of exclusively ecclesiastical Latin studies in church schools was matched by moves to abandon secular Irish studies. A learned Irish poem on the graves of the kings at Clonmacnoise was possibly inspired by the ceremonial occasion when the remains of the late high-king Ruaidri O’Conor were reburied in a stone ‘shrine’ at Clonmacnoise in 1207. It ends with verses which lament the refusal of the monks of Clonmacnoise (by this date Augustinian canons) to accept the composition, and appeals instead to the succeeding king of Connacht, Cathal Croibderg O’Conor, to protect and reward 46 Lawlor, St Bernard of Clairvaux’s Life of St Malachy, p. 9. 47 Compare Archbishop Lanfranc’s reproof to Bishop Domnall Ó hÉnna: ‘You also sent problems of profane learning for us to elucidate; but it does not befit a bishop’s manner of life to be concerned with studies of that kind. Long ago in our youth we did devote our time to these matters, but when we came to pastoral responsibility we decided to give them up altogether’: Helen Clover and Margaret Gibson (eds), The letters of Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury, 1057–1089 (Oxford, 1979), pp 158–61. 48  McManus, A guide to Ogam, pp 156–63. 49  AU 2, pp 176–7 (AD1174). 50 AU 2, pp 140–1 (AD1162). 51 AU 2, pp 160–3 (AD1169).

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the poet.52 Twenty years later, the Cistercian visitor to that order’s houses in Ireland, Bishop Stephen Lexington, recommended, after a violent series of internal disagreements known as the ‘Conspiracy of Mellifont’, that no official recognition be given by the Cistercian communities in Ireland to the Irish language, that monoglot Irishmen were disqualified for the vocation of monk, and only Latin or French should be used for community business.53 Just as similar pressures had led elsewhere to the founding of self-governing universities so, in Ireland, secular schools, what we might describe as ‘bardic schools’, sprang up for the study of traditional Irish history, poetry, music, law and medicine, all conducting their studies through the medium of the Irish language, and using as textbooks in many cases transcriptions from the work of the pre-reform church schools.54 The schools of medicine, however, formed something of an exception, in that they came to rely on translated versions of standard medical textbooks from English and Continental universities, and many of their teachers went abroad to gain university degrees in medicine.55 Closely linked to the rise of secular schools for the study of native learning, was the development of a new literary standard for the Irish language, described nowadays as Classical, or Early Modern Irish. Old Irish constitutes a standard written dialect developed in the seventh century, and used more or less correctly with no perceptible regional variations to the end of the ninth century. However, Middle Irish, between 900 and 1200, in effect seems to represent the increasingly unsuccessful attempts of church schoolmen to continue to maintain the Old Irish system when their own spoken dialect had developed too far beyond that stage for them to achieve consistency in its application.56 Classical Irish, appearing first in the surviving texts of praise-poems from about AD1200, and less consistently reflected in prose texts from the thirteenth century onwards, represented a new countrywide literary standard based on the spoken language of the day, and including many dialect forms as permissible variants used for rhyming purposes.57 52  R.I. Best, ‘The graves of the kings at Clonmacnois’, Ériu, 2 (1905), 163–71: 169–71; AFM 3, pp 152–3; Gwynn & Hadcock, Medieval religious houses, p. 165. 53 Barry O’Dwyer, The Conspiracy of Mellifont, 1216–1231 (Dublin, 1970), pp 14, 37–9; idem, ‘The problem of reform in the Irish Cistercian monasteries and the attempted solution of Stephen Lexington in 1228’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 15 (1964), 186–91: 188–91; idem, Stephen of Lexington: letters, pp 68, 91–2, 162, 210. See above, p. 273. 54 Proinsias MacCana, ‘The rise of the later schools of Filidheacht’, Ériu, 25 (1974), 126–46; Katharine Simms, ‘The brehons of later medieval Ireland’ in Hogan and Osborough (eds), Brehons, serjeants and attorneys, pp 51–76, at p. 74 note 134. 55 Aoibheann Nic Dhonnchadha, ‘Early Modern Irish medical writings’, Newsletter of the School of Celtic Studies, 4 (Dublin, 1990), 35–9; Francis Shaw, ‘Irish medical men and philosophers’ in Brian Ó Cuív (ed.), Seven centuries of Irish learning, 1000– 1700 (Dublin, 1961), pp 87–101. 56  See Kim McCone, The Early Irish verb (2nd ed., Maynooth, 1997), p. 168; idem, ‘The Würzburg and Milan glosses: our earliest sources of “Middle Irish”’, Ériu, 36 (1985), 85–106: 103. 57 Damian McManus, ‘Teanga an dána agus teanga an phróis’ in Pádraig Ó Fiannachta (ed.), Léachtaí Colm Cille, 24 (Má Nuad, 1994),

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Side by side with this newly standardized grammar and vocabulary, which became the written medium for all vernacular schools in Ireland and Scotland, came a new standard of perfection in rhyme and metre, known as dán dírech or ‘straight verse’.58 This was to become the hall-mark of the highest grade of praise-poet, men who described themselves as filid. In the written record these two new standards of metre and language appear with little warning fully-formed at the outset of the thirteenth century, and attempts to account for their development vary between a concourse held by the poets of Ireland to agree between themselves on the new standards, much as the church of the day was holding synods to reform its structures and canon law,59 or a more gradual development of in-house regulations by the leading family of praise-poets who dominated their profession in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Uí Dálaig (O’Dalys) of Meath.60 As Mac Cana has pointed out, these two explanations are not mutually exclusive.61 Countrywide assemblies of the poetic order are known to have taken place from the fourteenth century onwards, and a poem in celebration of the first recorded event of this kind in 1351 implies that earlier nationwide gatherings had taken the form of an invitation issued to the poets from the head of one of the poetic schools.62 Of the 53 surviving praise-poems from all parts of Ireland that can be assigned with greater or lesser confidence to an early thirteenth century date (AD1200–33), in the case of 27 the surname of the author is not recorded, 23 are attributed to Ó Dálaig poets, one to an Ó Máel Chonaire (O’Mulconry) of Connacht and 2 to the Ulster poet Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide (MacNamee).63 Eight of the 53 poems are addressed to a single king, Cathal Croibderg O’Conor (‘C. of the Red Hand’), provincial king of Connacht from c.1196 to AD1224. As well as clearly sponsoring the new literary movement, this king was closely involved with church reform. He founded the Cistercian monastery of Abbeyknockmoy in Galway, and during his reign the church for the Cistercian abbey of Boyle (county Roscommon) was built, where the famous dán dírech composer of religious verse, Donnchad Mór Ó Dálaig (‘Donough O’Daly the pp 114–35; idem, ‘Classical Modern Irish’ in Kim McCone and Katharine Simms (eds), Progress in medieval Irish studies (Maynooth, 1996), pp 165–87; Brian Ó Cuív, ‘The linguistic training of the medieval Irish poet’, Celtica, 10 (1973), 114–40. 58 Brian Ó Cuív, ‘Some developments in Irish metrics’, Éigse, 12 (1967–8), 273–90; Eleanor Knott, An introduction to Irish syllabic poetry (2nd ed., Dublin, 1957), pp 2–20. 59 MacCana, ‘The rise of the later schools of filidheacht’, p. 139 and note. 60 Simms, ‘Literacy and the Irish bards’, pp 241–3. 61  Mac Cana, ‘Praise poetry in Ireland’, p. 14 note 3; Katharine Simms, ‘Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh and the Classical Revolution’ in I. Brown, T.O. Clancy, S. Manning and M. Pittock (eds), The Edinburgh history of Scottish literature, vol. 1, From Columba to the Union (until 1707) (Edinburgh, 2006), pp 83–90, at pp 83–4. 62 Simms, ‘Literacy and the Irish bards’, p. 244; Eleanor Knott, ‘Filidh Éireann go haointeach’, Ériu, 5 (1911), 163–87: 52–3. 63  Figures based on my electronic catalogue, searchable on the internet at http://bardic.celt.dias.ie/.

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Great’), was buried in 1244. O’Conor also introduced parochial tithes into his kingdom of Connacht, and three poems by Donnchad Mór strongly urge the faithful to pay these regularly.64 Genealogies of the Uí Dálaig family claim the equally famous poet Muiredach Ó Dálaig of Lissadell (county Sligo) as a brother of Donnchad Mór, and it may have been through the marriage of Cathal Croibderg’s daughter Lasairfhína and Domnall Mór O’Donnell, king of Tír Conaill (1208–41), that King Domnall Mór became patron to Muiredach Ó Dálaig, and the new standard of dán dírech was introduced to Ulster.65 A poem by Muiredach Ó Dálaig of Lissadell recalls his youth spent by the river Boyle, and if he can be identified with the contemporary poet ‘Muiredach Albanach’ (‘M. the Scotsman’), as is generally agreed, at least five religious poems of unimpeachable orthodoxy are attributed to him.66 Muiredach, however, did not spend long in the service of O’Donnell. A semilegendary account of his life in the Four Masters’ Annals under the year 1213, partially borne out by references contained in the poems attributed to this author, indicate that he quarrelled with an official in O’Donnell’s service, named by the Four Masters as Finn Ó Brolcháin, murdered the man with an axe, and fled from Tír Conaill, ultimately to take up residence in Scotland in the service of the earls of Lennox. He was later to pass through Ireland again on his way to and from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but only the Four Masters’ late and unsupported statement asserts that he was forgiven and taken back into O’Donnell’s service before his death.67 As we have seen in Chapter 8, the early link shown in the case of the Ó Dálaig family between dán dírech poets and church reform is also seen in the career of Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide (MacNamee), who succeeded Muiredach Ó Dálaig as ollam or court poet to Domnall Mór O’Donnell and later served as ollam to Domnall Mór’s three sons, all kings of Tír Conaill, and also to Brian O’Neill (d.1260), king of Tír Eógain and self-styled ‘king of the kings of Ireland’. Not only is Gilla Brigte associated with Máel Pátraic Ó Scannail, the Dominican bishop of Raphoe, both on the occasion of Domnall Óc O’Donnell’s inauguration in 1258, and when celebrating completion of the new cathedral at Armagh, built by Ó Scannail after his elevation to the primacy, but at least three religious poems are attributed to Gilla Brigte, all showing influence of the reform movement. In Deasgaidh gach uilc an t-uabhar the poet neatly turns the tale of 64 Gwynn & Hadcock, Medieval religious houses, pp 124, 128–9; Ann. Conn., pp 4–5, 82–3 (AD1224, 1244); Lambert McKenna (ed.), Dan Dé (Dublin, 1922), nos. XXV, XXVII verse 18, XXVIII verse 35. 65 Séamus Pender (ed.), ‘The O’Clery Book of Genealogies’, Anal. Hib., 18 (Dublin, 1951), 46; Ó Muraíle, The Gt Bk of Ir. Gen., 1, p. 320; Simms, ‘Muireadhach Albanach’. 66 Thomas M’Lauchlan (ed.), The Dean of Lismore’s Book: a selection of ancient Gaelic poetry (Edinburgh, 1862), pp 157–8, 120–1; DiD, no. 41; Aithd., no. 70; Bergin, IBP, no. 21; William Gillies (ed.), ‘Réidhigh an croidhe, a mheic Dhé’, Studia Celtica, 14–15 (1979– 80), 81–6. 67 Brian Ó Cuív, ‘Eachtra Mhuireadhaigh Í Dhálaigh’, Studia Hibernica, 1 (1961), 56–69; Simms, ‘Muireadhach Albanach’.

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the Fall of Man into an exhortation to pay parochial tithes by describing the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as the tenth apple tree which had been set aside for God. Sinful Eve was not content to limit herself to the other nine, but took God’s tithe also.68 In Lá bhraith an Choimdheadh an Chéadaoin he expresses disapproval of generosity shown to the lower orders of poets, the crosán and the cáinte, at the expense of alms to the sick and the poor.69 Crann do chuir amach Naoi nár deals with the importance of confession and penitence. All three poems contain passages in praise of the Virgin Mary whose cult had been promoted by the Cistercians and St Bernard in particular,70 and all three enumerate the Eight Vices, or Seven Deadly Sins as headings under which a penitent could examine his conscience. What is somewhat surprising is that Gilla Brigte’s poems are the only three works on religious subjects out of the 105 compositions of professional praisepoets that are identified with greater or lesser confidence on my electronic database as the work of Ulster authors or addressed to Ulster patrons between about AD1200 and 1500:71 religious 3% historical 4% miscellaneous 6%

patrons 87%

Fig. 24 Distribution by subject-matter of medieval poems of Ulster provenance from the bardic database www.bardic.celt.dias.ie. 68 Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, no. 20. 69 Ibid., no. 21, verses 26–7. I understand the phrase ‘ag conaibh na [g]cáinte’ in verse 26, line 3, as ‘for the cáintes’ dogs’ rather than the editor’s translation ‘yelping dogs’, and have discussed this proposed emendation in Katharine Simms, ‘An eaglais agus filí na scol’ in Pádraig Ó Fiannachta (ed.), An dán díreach, Léachtaí Cholm Cille 24 (Maigh Nuad, 1994), pp 21–36, at p. 35 note 22. See also Simms, ‘Literacy and the Irish bards’, p. 246. 70 O’Dwyer, Mary: a history of devotion, pp 22–5. 71 These figures refer to a search of the electronic database at www.bardic.celt.dias.ie and exclude 32 further poems from the Book of Magauran (also not on religious subjects), since this area was reckoned as part of Connacht in the medieval period. Magauran poems will however be drawn

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages love 3% miscellaneous 15%

patrons 59% religious 19%

historical 4%

Fig. 25 Distribution by subject-matter of medieval poems of Ireland-wide provenance from the bardic database www.bardic.celt.dias.ie

This provides a contrast with the general body of 520 poems ascribed on the database to the same twelfth to fifteenth century period where religious poetry forms 19% of the whole. This all-Ireland corpus also shows a much greater proportion of poems on miscellaneous subjects (15% rather than 6%) and even a certain number of love poems (see Fig. 25). A number of considerations account for such a contrast. In the more cosmopolitan south of Ireland, not all medieval poetry in bardic metres was the work of professionals – the corpus includes compositions by Earl Gerald ‘the Rhymer’ Fitzgerald of Desmond (d.1398), Diarmait Ó Briain, probably the king of Thomond of that name (d.1364), and Richard Butler, probably the brother of the 4th earl of Ormond and father of Edmund ‘mac Richard’ Butler, patron of Bodleian MS Laud 610 (‘The Saltair of Mac Richard Butler’).72 Another point concerns the method by which poems were ascribed to a particular region when assembling the database. Poems to patrons were associated with the home territory of the patron addressed, whereas poems on general subjects such as love or religion were associated with the homeland of their authors. The chart highlights the plain fact that before 1500 Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide was the only well-known and prolific poet from within Ulster itself, whereas a number of the eulogies and elegies commissioned by Ulster on for evidence concerning poets and patrons subsequently, since the Mag Shamradáin territory of Tellach Echdach lies in the modern county Cavan. 72 Simms, ‘Literacy and the Irish bards’, pp 249–51; eadem, ‘The Geraldines and Gaelic culture’ in Peter Crooks and Seán Duffy (eds), The Geraldines and medieval Ireland: the making of a myth (Dublin, 2016),

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Mac Gurcaigh ?Scotland O hUiginn north Connacht O Sleibin Fir Manach O Fialain Fir Manach O Faelain Fir Manach O hEchaiden Ulaid O Dalaig Munster, Meath, Breifne O Cuirnin Breifne O Cleirig migrated to Tir Conaill O Cianain Fir Manach Mac Rithbertaig Fir Manach Mac Eochada Leinster Mac Raith Munster Mac Con Mide Tir Eogain Mac an Chnaide Ulaid Mac an Baird migrated to Tir Conaill Anon 0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

Fig. 26 Chart showing the distribution of authors’ surnames for poems to Ulster patrons or by Ulster poets twelfth–fifteenth centuries, from the bardic database www.bardic.celt.dias.ie.

chieftains were the work of famous poets based outside Ulster, in particular the Ó hUicinn (O’Higgin) family of north Sligo, and to a lesser extent members of the even more eminent Ó Dálaig poetic dynasty. While these outsiders’ odes to Ulster lay patrons figure on the ‘Ulster’ chart (see Fig. 24), their religious poems were naturally credited to the Connacht and Munster areas respectively. (See Fig. 26) Almost a third of the total (31) are by Mac Con Mide poets who were settled on land near the modern Ardstraw, in west Tyrone close to the county Donegal border.73 This area is of particular interest, in that there is some evidence for the pp 264–77, at pp 267–9. 73 Myles Dillon, ‘Ceart Uí Néill’, Studia Celtica, 1 (1966), 1–18: 8–9. Twenty-two poems ascribed to Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide are edited in Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde. Three are attributed to Conchobar Ruad Mac Con Mide (P.A. Breatnach, ‘Ar bás Aodha an Einigh Mhéig Uidhir AD1428’, Éigse, 21 (1986), 37–52; ABM, no. 288; Gordon Ó Riain, ‘Dán Réitigh le Conchobhar Ruadh Mac Con Midhe (d. 1481)’ in Pádraig A. Breatnach, Caoimhín Breatnach and Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail (eds), Léann Láimhscríbhinní Lobháin: the Louvain manuscript heritage (Dublin, 2007), pp 54–75), and four to Brian Ruad Mac Con Mide (J.G. O’Keeffe, ‘Poems on the O’Donnells’, Ir. Texts II, pp 35, 40, 45; ABM, no. 464). Two more doubtful attributions to Gilla Brigte occur in the Book of O’Conor Don

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pursuit of Irish-language studies in history, genealogy and place-names continuing perhaps into the early thirteenth century at the nearby church sites of Drumleene and Derry, and Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide, the first recorded poet from this family, can be seen to make use of the Drumleene material.74 As described earlier, the role of Armagh as a centre of vernacular studies had already been curtailed under the influence of the native Irish reformed primates before the arrival of foreign and Anglo-Irish archbishops to complete the break with past tradition. Texts originating with the tenth- and eleventh-century Armagh school passed into general circulation in the high Middle Ages through manuscript anthologies originating in Leinster and Clonmacnoise, and some are traceable to Clonmacnoise connections with the Armagh-influenced schools in Louth and Monasterboice,75 but there is little sign of the continuing preservation of actual manuscripts of vernacular learning (as opposed to Latin liturgical works) from the library of the unreformed church school that had once flourished in Armagh, except perhaps for the old manuscript now lost that formed the exemplar for the earliest layer of entries in the Annals of Ulster, and even this may have been transmitted via the late twelfth-century school at Derry.76 As a result the axis of advanced vernacular learning in Ulster ran in a north–south line from Derry to the Erne, and at its southern end mingled, in terms of an exchange of scribes and students, with the Clonmacnoise-influenced schools of vernacular learning in Westmeath and north Connacht.77 The preponderance of the Mac Con Mide school in surviving texts of dán dírech poetry addressed to medieval Ulster patrons reflects this geographical imbalance. So does the concentration of poetic families in Fir Manach which was matched by the presence of vernacular scholars of history, law and medicine there, together with some individual teachers of Latin learning also.78 These latter served no doubt as masters of studia particularia where less ambitious clerical students could prepare for ordination without the need to seek out a seminary in the area of Anglo-Irish settlement or a university abroad.79 A number of (see Simms, ‘Donegal poems’, p. 51). To these could be added undated but probably late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century religious poems attributed to Flann and Solam Mac Con Mide (Aithd., no. 85, and ‘Cionta na colla is cúis truaighe’, National Library of Scotland, Advocate MS, 72/1/42). 74 Simms, ‘The Donegal poems’. 75 Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, ‘Lebar buide meic murchada’ in T.C. Barnard, D. Ó Cróinín and K. Simms (eds), A miracle of learning: studies in manuscripts and Irish learning: essays in honour of William O’Sullivan (Aldershot, 1998), pp 40–51, at p. 41; J.F. Kenney, The sources for the early history of Ireland: ecclesiastical (New York, 1929), pp 15, 25, 308, 458; See Annette Kehnel, Clonmacnois – the church and lands of St Ciarán: change and continuity in an Irish monastic foundation, 6th to 16th century (Münster, 1997), p. 49. 76 See Aubrey Gwynn, Cathal (Óg) Mac Maghnusa and the Annals of Ulster (reprinted from Clogher Record, 2 (1958–9)), with intro. by Nollaig Ó Muraíle (Enniskillen, 1998), pp 41, 45. 77  James Carney, ‘The Ó Cianáin miscellany’, Ériu, 21 (1969), 122–47; O’Grady & Flower, Cat. Ir. MSS, 2, pp 462–5, 526, 543. 78  Simms, ‘Medieval Fermanagh’, p. 98; Katharine Simms, ‘The brehons of later medieval Ireland’, pp 51–76, at p. 69. 79 See Jefferies, Priests and prelates, pp 75–6; Jefferies, ‘The diocese of

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conditions favoured such a haven of scholarship. The many church settlements located on islands in the great lakes of the Erne may have provided a comparatively secure environment protecting the unarmed scholars from casual assaults of the lawless, although there are a number of records of the islands being sacked in times of war.80 The pre-reform church settlement of St Molaisse of Devenish in particular had an active school of poetry and history in the midtwelfth century,81 and a traditional link with Clonmacnoise,82 and the failure of the reformers to set aside any church land within the rural deanery of Loch Erne as glebe land for the parish priests meant that the erenaghs, or hereditary stewards of the church lands and their kinsmen, were particularly well-off and influential in this region. Most of the Fir Manach scholars of native vernacular learning were either clerics or erenaghs themselves, or were members of such a family.83 One would have to add, of course, that we have exceptionally detailed information about Fir Manach and its clerical and learned families because a member of this class, Cathal Óc Mac Magnusa (MacManus), was compiling the Annals of Ulster there in the fifteenth century.84 The limitation of Ulster’s own literary output to a traditional class of trained poets and historians of merely local status was to change sharply in the early modern period. Under the twin influences of the northern Renaissance and educational reforms associated with the Counter-Reformation movement, a number of Ulster lay lords acquired a taste for composing poetry, most notably the chief Magnus O’Donnell (d.1563), and great quantities of poems promulgating post-Tridentine theology became a key element in CounterReformation strategy. Over the course of the sixteenth century the spreading control of the English government over the south and east of Ireland with its official disapproval of the influence of bardic poets meant that Ulster and north Connacht became centres for bardic composition, the home of the most preeminent poets of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Tadc Dall Ó hUicinn, Fergal Óc Mac an Baird, Eogan Ruad Mac an Baird, Eochaid Ó hEogusa, Gilla Brigte Ó hEogusa, Ferflatha Ó Gním. The establishment of an Irish College in Louvain, combined with the celebrated ‘Flight of the Earls’ (1607) which brought a community of Ulster lay nobility to the Lowlands also, gave an extra lease of life to the remnants of Gaelic culture Dromore’, p. 128; Jefferies, ‘Derry diocese’, p. 189. 80 Simms, ‘Medieval Fermanagh’, pp 79, 81–3, 89–90. 81 Muireann Ní Bhrolcháin, ‘The Banshenchas revisited’ in Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wichert (eds), Chattel, servant or citizen: women’s status in church, state and society, Historical Studies, 19 (Belfast, 1995), pp 70–81, at pp 70–1; Kevin Murray, ‘Gilla Mo Dutu Úa Caiside’ in John Carey, Máire Herbert and Kevin Murray (eds), Cín Chille Cúile: texts, saints and places, essay in honour of Pádraig Ó Riain (Aberystwyth, 2004), pp 150–62. 82 Kehnel, Clonmacnois, pp 76–7. 83 Peadar Livingstone, The Fermanagh story (Enniskillen, 1969), pp 40–2; Simms, ‘Medieval Fermanagh’, p. 98 and notes. See also Ciarán Ó Scea, ‘Erenachs, erenachships and church landholding in Gaelic Fermanagh, 1270–1609’, PRIA, 112C (2012), 271–300. 84 Gwynn, Cathal Óg, ed. Ó Muraíle.

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in an area free from English rule. The manuscripts produced in this seventeenthcentury Irish ‘colony’ have ensured a disproportionately strong representation of poems by Ulster poets or addressed to Ulster patrons in the early modern period. Besides the surviving texts of poems by named Ulster authors, the medieval annals record a number of other Ulster poets whose work has not come down to us,85 and casual references in poetry and prose indicate that every ruler was expected to have a personal poet, and that wandering bands of poets attended local assemblies, and the feasts held by chieftains on public holidays such as Christmas and Easter.86 Clearly all this would have given rise to a mass of bardic compositions at the time, but only a very selective sample has survived. Over half of all the bardic verse extant today dates from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and has mostly been preserved for us in roughly contemporary paper manuscripts of the seventeenth century. Apart from the chance survival of an actual medieval manuscript of bardic verse, such as the ‘Book of Magauran’87 or the Ó hUicinn anthology bound in with the ‘Yellow Book of Lecan’,88 the comparatively few medieval poems we have today were transmitted by later scribes because of their intrinsic excellence as poems, copybook examples that could serve as models of composition to sixteenthcentury students, or sources of aesthetic pleasure to seventeenth-century literary connoisseurs.89 As a result, most of the medieval bardic eulogies available to us now are of the highest quality, compositions of the dán dírech poets. It seems probable that the bulk of the professional praise-poets who wandered from fair to fair and from feast to feast composed their works in brúilingecht. Metres composed in this mode followed all the rules of the most complex dán dírech metres as regards syllable count, alliteration and the pattern of rhyming words within each verse, but the rhymes themselves did not need to be phonetically perfect, making it possible for a brúilingecht poet to imitate the metres by ear alone even if the poet were illiterate, as the bards of the ninth and tenth centuries were said to do.90 We have one written collection of brúilingecht poetry attributed to three presumably related poets, Seithfín Mór, Seithfín Óc and Máelsechlainn 85 E.g., AFM 3, pp 598–9, 604–5; 4, pp 666–7, 670–1, 734–5, 742–3, 796–7; 846–7, 884–5, 900–1, 974–5, 1004–5, 1106–7, 1114–15, 1206–7 (AD1350, 1354, 1376, 1378, 1394, 1396, 1408, 1420, 1431, 1434, 1451, 1459, 1478, 1480, 1493). 86 P.A. Breatnach, ‘The chief ’s poet’, PRIA, 83C (1983), 3–79; Pól Breatnach (ed.), Leabhar Chlainne Suibhne: an account of the Mac Sweeney families in Ireland, with pedigrees (Dublin, 1920), pp 32–9; C.M. O’Sullivan, Hospitality, pp 35–42. 87 McKenna, Book of Magauran. 88 Aithd. 89 Brian Ó Cuív, The Irish bardic duanaire or poem-book (Dublin, 1974); Damian McManus, ‘The bardic poet as teacher, student and critic: a context for the Grammatical Tracts’ in Cathal Ó hÁinle and Donald Meek (eds), Unity in diversity (Dublin, 2004), pp 97–124, at pp 106–10; Wilson McLeod, Divided Gaels: Gaelic cultural identities in Scotland and Ireland, c.1200–c.1650 (Oxford, 2004), p. 61. 90 Knott, An introduction to Irish syllabic poetry, p. 2; Donnchadh Ó hAodha, ‘The first Middle Irish metrical tract’ in Hildegard L.C. Tristram (ed.), Metrik und Medienwechsel/Metrics and media (Tübingen, 1991), pp 207–44, at p. 221; CIH, 3, p. 1132,

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mac Seithfín (no surname being indicated). These are addressed to a number of mid-fifteenth century Irish patrons,91 including Ulster chieftains, and it is noticeable that the poems, although witty and vivid, do not contain any learned allusions to mythology, dindshenchas or history, suggesting that the authors were not necessarily well-read. The informal anthology collected in the early sixteenth century by the Scottish Dean of Lismore92 contains a preponderance of brúilingecht poetry. Apart from the casual nature of the collection itself, in Scotland bards continued to enjoy a higher social status than in Ireland, where the term became attached to a subordinate poet or reciter of poetry in the service of a learned fer dána or fili.93 A third mode of poetic composition was ógláchas, which derived its name from the fact that it was suited to the amateur gentleman or squire (óglách, ‘a military vassal’) who wished to write poetry without intensive training in the art.94 The metres in this mode were very much simpler versions of the dán dírech metres, with fewer and imperfect rhymes, loose syllable count and optional alliteration. In effect, ógláchas verse represented a continuation of the looser metres used by learned monastic authors for their academic compositions in the pre-reform church schools,95 and it continued to be used in compositions by, or in favour of, hereditary erenaghs, vaunting the prestige of their local saints and threatening supernatural vengeance on those who failed to render their dues to the saint’s shrine, making the precise dating of such compositions quite a problem.96 There was an obvious reason for preserving in written form ecclesiastical claims even when couched in lower grade verse, but the same loose metres were no doubt used every day by the illiterate lower grades of the poetic profession, including the crosán, or buffoon, and the cáinte, or satirist, and such oral compositions were not normally considered worth recording in writing and have vanished with their authors. An early fourteenth-century dán dírech poet, Gilla na Náem Ó hUicinn, complained of penny-pinching chieftains in his day who thought it adequate to entertain guests at their feasts with such inexact bardic composition (camdhán fiar fíorlochtach) or worse still the popular balladstyle (abhrán) of peasants and women, troops of entertainers who performed in return for their dinner, rather than commissioning the ornate work of a fullylines 20–2. 91 ABM, nos. 67, 90, 213, 327, 328; Bergin, IBP, no. 40. McKenna has noted that The Book of Magauran contains one poem in ógláchas (no. 6) and two in brúilingecht (nos. 7, 15). In a patron’s family anthology of this kind, the subject-matter is more important than the aesthetics of composition. 92 E.g., W.J. Watson (ed.), Scottish verse from the Book of the Dean of Lismore (Edinburgh, 1937). 93  McLeod, Divided Gaels, pp 55, 65–70. See McManus, ‘The bardic poet as teacher’, pp 119–20. 94  Knott, An introduction to Irish syllabic poetry, p. 2; eadem, Tadhg Dall, 1, pp lxxxviii–lxxxix and see above, p. 289. 95 See Brian Ó Cuív, ‘Some developments in Irish metrics’, Éigse, 12 (1967–8), 273–90: 290. 96 Doherty, ‘The transmission of the cult of St Máedhóg’, pp 281–3; Gillespie, ‘A sixteenthcentury saint’s life’, pp 147–8; Simms, ‘Frontiers in the Irish church – regional and cultural’, pp 196–7; T.G. Ó Canann, ‘A poem on the rights of the coarb of Saint Molaisse’, Clogher

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qualified fili who could expect to be paid in gold and silver, goblets and scarlet cloth, heads of cattle and horses.97 The late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries saw the medieval English lordship in Ireland reach its fullest territorial extent, as the power of Richard de Burgh (d.1326), the ‘Red Earl’ of Ulster, penetrated even into Tír Conaill and Fir Manach,98 and similar control was being exercised over the western coasts of Mayo and Kerry.99 This Anglo-Irish dominance had its effect on the cultural perceptions of Gaelic secular and church leaders of that period. The formal ceremonial praise-poem of the learned fili was designed to certify the justice and legitimacy of a king’s rule. In origin such a solemn declaration in verse had been seen as an invocation of favourable divine judgement, much as a satire invoked divine displeasure, and there are many traces of this view of the power of a poet to bless in the commissioning of poems for weddings, newly-built houses (or even the cathedral at Armagh) or, of course, odes for the inauguration of a new king.100 In more rational terms, an eminent, well-born and fully-qualified ollam of praise poetry (ollam re dán) did not normally address minor chieftains, partly, it would seem, to maintain the dignity of his office, and partly because they could not afford the high price he would regularly expect in return. Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide, for example, in addition to his tax-free landed estate, received an annual pension of twenty in-calf milch cows every May Day from both Brian O’Neill and later Domnall Óc O’Donnell.101 Consequently, commissioning ornate poems from the head of a poetic school was a demonstration both of a chief ’s wealth and high rank, and of official approval by a respected member of the learned classes. However, in the conditions of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, when an Irish chief ’s hold on power depended rather on the support of his Anglo-Irish overlord than of his own subjects, the ceremonial endorsement of a praise-poet might seem superfluous, not worth the high price customarily exacted by the filid. Hence, as Gilla na Náem Ó hUicinn complained, the more economical rulers might fall back on the oral productions of unlearned poets and balladeers simply to provide entertainment at feasts. It may not be a coincidence that we have no surviving bardic poems addressed to the ‘Red Earl’s’ protégés, Áed Buide I O’Neill (d.1283), his brother Niall Cúlánach, or his son Brian II (d.1296), or indeed his rival, Domnall O’Neill (d.1325).102 The only fragment of a poem addressed to Áed O’Donnell, king of Tír Conaill Record, 15:1 (1994), 7–24. See above, p. 289. 97  McKenna, Book of Magauran, no. 27. 98  Above, pp 106–8, 118–19. 99  Katharine Simms, ‘A lost tribe – the Clan Murtagh O’Conors’, Galway Archaeological and Historical Society Journal, 53 (2001), 1–22: 6–7; OtwayRuthven, Med. Ire., pp 174–5. 100 See Proinsias Mac Cana, ‘An archaism in Irish poetic tradition’, Celtica, 8 (1968), 174–81; Katharine Simms, ‘Native sources for Gaelic settlement: the house poems’ in Patrick J. Duffy, David Edwards and Elizabeth FitzPatrick (eds), Gaelic Ireland: land, lordship and settlement, c.1250–c.1650 (Dublin, 2001), pp 246–67. 101 Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, pp 104–5, 138–9. 102 See above, pp 100–9.

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(1281–1333), comes in the Book of Magauran directly after Ó hUicinn’s poem about the switch to patronage of balladeers, and implies that the Tír Conaill ruler had not paid the author for his last poem. These verses may well be a pointed codicil attached to Gilla na Náem’s eulogy of Magauran, in which the latter chief is praised for his extravagant generosity, in contrast to more miserly rulers, particularly as Ó hUicinn’s poem announces that he has just arrived at Magauran’s court from Fanad in Tír Conaill.103 In parallel with the circumstances of secular chieftains, Gaelic Irish churchmen in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries were becoming increasingly dependent on the English king’s approval to gain access to higher church office, and in the case of the Armagh primacy were to find themselves almost totally excluded after 1303. Some of their bishops went through an Anglophile phase at this period. The archbishop of Cashel and his suffragans offered in 1280 to excommunicate all Irishmen who continued to adhere to Irish customary ‘Brehon’ law if King Edward I would allow them to purchase a general grant of English law for all Irishmen outside Ulster. The king’s response, describing Brehon laws as ‘detestable to God and so contrary to all laws that they ought not to be called laws’, may echo the wording of the archbishop’s petition.104 Bardic poetry also came under attack from the church, perhaps in the same late thirteenth-century period, and certainly by the first half of the fourteenth century. A poem on this topic, A theachtaire thig ó’n Róimh, ‘O messenger who comes from Rome’, is addressed to a noble patron from an Uí Néill or Connacht dynasty (Clann Chuinn) called ‘Domnall’ and is attributed in a late copy to Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide. If this attribution is correct the patron would have been Domnall Óc O’Donnell, king of Tír Conaill (d.1281). The author reproaches the native clergy for their ‘ugly Anglicized learning’ (léigheann gránna gallda), which calls for the banishment of all poets,105 and in an elegant, erudite and polished defence of his art that would tend to confirm the attribution to Gilla Brigte himself, complains that an instruction from the pope in Rome has been deliberately widened in application and distorted into a ‘dethroning of the poetic art’ and a ban on all payments to poets. If the art of praise-poetry was unChristian, he argues, invoking Patrick’s alleged censorship of Irish customary law as narrated in the pseudo-historical prologue to the Senchas Már, why was it not banned by St Patrick? Why did SS Colmcille and Mó Bí pay for poems? 103 McKenna, Book of Magauran, pp 248–9. This would render the whole of poem 27 a form of ‘trefhocal’ or formal poetic warning of imminent satire aimed at the defaulting patron O’Donnell as well as a eulogy of Magauran. See Breatnach, ‘Satire and the poet’s circuit’, pp 25–6, 31; Breatnach, Uraicecht na Ríar, pp 138–9. 104 A.J. Otway-Ruthven, ‘The request of the Irish for English law, 1277–1280’, IHS, 6 (1949), 261–70: 269; see Katharine Simms, ‘The brehons of later medieval Ireland’, p. 67. 105 Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, pp 204–13. I translate the phrase in brackets somewhat differently from the editor, who renders it as ‘grim, barbaric learning’ (p. 205, verse 6).

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Again the poet’s learned appeal to Middle Irish sources from the north of Ireland is very compatible with the ascription to Gilla Brigte. His argument that payment to poets is justified by Colmcille’s example also comes in an ógláchas poem found in the fourteenth-century Book of Uí Maine (RIA MS D ii 1), which is structured as a dialogue between Colmcille, the poet Dallán Forgaill and Colmcille’s successor Baithín, who voices the clerical objections to patronage of poets as ‘worldliness’. Colmcille replies that God repaid David for his psalms with a prosperous reign on earth and heaven when he died: ‘every cleric who makes not bestowal to prevent the reviling of the church, it were the same for him as that he should revile the countenance of the Creator’.106 In this poem it is only the propriety of clergy themselves paying for praise-poems in their own honour which is questioned, and this reservation went back as far as the Old Irish text Miadshlechtae: ‘as for the law of the godly folk, only praise of God is ordained, and heaven is its reward’.107 It is possible that whatever decree had originally issued from Rome was similarly related to the conduct of the clergy themselves, but we learn not only from the protests of the poets, but from the annals and synodal decrees that the clergy in Ireland extended their campaign into an attempt to ban all payments to praise-poets in the course of the fourteenth century, and to eliminate the whole class of the ‘men of art’ from Irish society. Decrees of the provincial synods of Armagh from the time of Archbishop Mág Airechtaig (1333–46) to Archbishop Colton (1381–1404) threatened with ecclesiastical censures all who gave payments to poets, harpers and lesser entertainers, and were echoed by similar synodal legislation in other parts of Ireland.108 From the indignant poems of protest against this ecclesiastical ban it can be gathered that poets were being censured on the grounds that their art was opposed to Christian principles, since their eulogies encouraged vanity, were filled with lies and diverted men’s gift-giving from more deserving ecclesiastical recipients.109 The poem ascribed to Gilla Brigte neatly refuted the distinction drawn in the Miadshlechtae between praise of man and praise of God: ‘The praising of men is the praising of Him who created them (moladh daoine is Dó is moladh . An Neach do-ní a gcruthoghadh)’.110 However the poet is clearly worried, like Gilla na Náem Ó hUicinn, that secular patrons themselves were beginning to question the traditionally high status and high prices paid for the ceremonial praise-poems of a fully-trained ollam, and this leads him into an interesting exposition of the social function of bardic poetry in Gaelic society: 106  Brian Ó Cuív, ‘A Colam Cille dialogue’, Éigse, 12:3 (1968), 165–72: 168–9. 107 Breatnach, ‘Satire, praise and the early Irish poet’, p. 64. 108 Chart, Reg. Swayne, p. 11; AFM 4, p. 685 note n. 109 Brian Ó Cuív, ‘An appeal on behalf of the profession of poetry’, Éigse, 14 (1971), 87–106; Bergin, IBP, no. 16; Eleanor Knott, ‘Filidh Éireann go haointeach’, Ériu, 5 (1911), 163–87. 110 Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, pp 208–9, verse 17. This point is driven home in an anonymous fourteenth-century composition on the same subject: ‘Why

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If poetry were suppressed, O people, so there was neither history nor ancient lays, every man for ever would die unheard of except for the name of everybody’s father … There would be lasting evil consequences … the forgetting of their ancestry such that they knew not the roots from which they derive … the suppression of encounters and battles of the men of Ireland … there would be no interest shown in prince nor noble descendants after their death … If the lore of the Sons of Conn were suppressed along with your poems, O Domhnall, the children of your kennel-keepers and your noble progeny would be equally high-born, equally base. If it be the great desire of the men of Ireland to expel the poets, every Irishman would have an insignificant birth, every nobleman would be a churl.111 As it happened, the fourteenth century was to see a shrinkage in the area of English rule and a resurgence in the power of the Gaelic chiefs. This brought a new anxiety to legitimize recent territorial gains by an appeal to the past, and to celebrate hard-won battles. For many paramount chiefs the most important victories of all were won over their Gaelic neighbours in the course of rebuilding or attempting to rebuild the province-wide over-kingships of the twelfth century.112 Bardic poetry that presented a king’s modern achievements as the natural result of his inborn heritage (dúthchas) from his glorious ancestors became a very necessary accompaniment to ceremonial feasts compulsorily attended by conquered vassal-chieftains. From 1351 onwards a succession of noble patrons outdid themselves in efforts to entertain all the poets of Ireland at extravagant feasts,113 and the praise-poets’ continued employment remained secure until the early seventeenth century. However the struggle with the church had left its mark. In later medieval ecclesiastical literature, especially the Irish Life of St Berach of Cloonbarry in Roscommon and the textually related Book of Fenagh, traditional tales of conflict between the church’s founding saint and the druids were re-told as disputes between the saint and a poet, or crosán.114 Now that the church had legislated against the poetic class as a whole, without distinguishing between the ‘virtuous’ learned fili and the ‘evil’ cáinte and crosán, the compositions of the poets themselves no longer show the same anxiety expressed by Gilla Brigte to should the Son of God not be pleased if we were to compose a eulogy on the creatures he fashions? … Craftsmen like the product of their hands to be praised’, Ó Cuív, ‘An appeal’, p.  94. 111  Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, pp 210–13. 112  See above, pp 124–6. 113 Katharine Simms, ‘Guesting and feasting in Gaelic Ireland’, JRSAI, 108 (1978), 67–100: 90–2; O’Sullivan, Hospitality, pp 114–16. 114 Compare Plummer, Vit. Sanct. Hib. 1, pp 80–4 with idem, Bethada Náem nÉrenn, 1, pp 33–7; 2, pp 32–6. Similarly compare Bk Fen., pp 126– 9 with ibid., pp 188–9.

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distinguish his role from that of the cáinte and the crosán. From the fifteenth century onwards we have examples of learned poets themselves composing crosántacht, a bewildering mixture of verses of conventional eulogy in the light snédbairdne metre typical of the crosán, interspersed with comic anecdotes in prose, many of them ostensibly quite irrelevant to the subject of the verse.115 Although it seems likely that there were no longer any real cáinti or full-time professional satirists in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ireland, since there is no mention of such people by English observers, the term is cheerfully applied to the lesser grades of poets in, for example, poems in the Leabhar Branach and patrons are praised for scattering wealth among them.116 Most striking of all is the appropriation by poets of the term ‘druid’ (druí) to describe the learned poets themselves, an affectation that was practised with increasing frequency into the mid-seventeenth century.117 Now that the memory of real paganism had grown dim the poets were happy to associate themselves with the high status and prophetic or magical powers accorded to druids in the sagas. Although English administrators continued to regard praise-poets as suspect on political grounds,118 the clerical campaign against the poets ended in the fourteenth century. In any case it seems to have had little impact in west Ulster, where the hereditary church families were themselves a main source of learned poets. Bishop Tomás O’Donnell of Raphoe (d.1337) is described as ‘eminent in wisdom and in general benevolence in food and in cattle to the learned and the poets of the world’.119 Bishop Art Mac Cathmail (MacCawell) of Clogher (d.1432) was praised as ‘a man of hospitality and piety, and who kept a guesthouse for poor and for [bardic] bands (‘damaib’), and for pilgrims’.120 Seaán Ó Fialáin (O’Phelan, d.1483) combined the offices of erenagh of Boho parish in Fir Manach and ollam or court poet to the sons of Philip Maguire.121 Meanwhile, the reform movement associated with the Franciscan Observant friars was warmly espoused by the hereditary learned classes who could easily relate to its emphasis on pious reading-matter in the vernacular for literate laypeople. Members of the Ó Cléirig (O’Clery) family of poets and historians were soon recruited into the Franciscan Observant community brought to Donegal by Áed Rúad O’Donnell in 1474, and this family’s Franciscan association continued into the seventeenth century, by which time they were joined in the Franciscan College of St Anthony at Louvain by scions of other 115  An early example is edited by Knott, Tadhg Dall, no. 34. See Alan Harrison, An Chrosántacht (Baile Átha Cliath, 1979). 116 Seán Mac Airt (ed.), Leabhar Branach, the Book of the O’Byrnes (Dublin, 1944), lines 2731, 3715. See also James Carney (ed.), Poems on the O’Reillys (Dublin, 1950), p. 11, line 259. 117 Mac Airt, Leabhar Branach, lines 840, 1328, 4042, 4177, 4187, 4215, 6385. See also Tadhg Ó Donnchadha (ed.), Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe (Dublin, 1931), p. 77, line 35; p. 190, line 20; DiD, no. 115, verses 1, 4. 118 Katharine Simms, ‘Bards and barons: the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and the native culture’ in R. Bartlett and A. MacKay (eds), Medieval frontier societies (Oxford, 1989), pp 177–97, at pp 183–8. 119  AU 2, pp 458–9 (AD1337). 120  AU 3, pp 122–3 (AD1432). 121  AU 3, pp 282–3

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Ulster poetic families such as Mac an Bhaird (Ward) and Ó hEoghusa (O’Hussey).122

P O E T S A N D PAT R O N S I N U L S T E R

As the foregoing discussion should have made clear, there were a lot of contradictions inherent in the poets’ role. In many ways their literacy and mobility meant they acted as a modernizing influence on an otherwise closed society. Their literacy put them in touch with the outside world and the Cistercian and Franciscan church reform movements. Anyone reading the work of the best dán dírech poets, such as Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide or Tadc Óc Ó hUicinn, is conscious of interacting with a trained mind, educated to a broader range of subjects than merely grammar and metrics. A thorough knowledge of sagas, genealogies, battle-lists and territorial boundaries was required of the fully-trained poet,123 but some authors show an additional familiarity with topics dealt with in the other vernacular schools, a knowledge of legal maxims or principles of medicine for example, and acquaintance with the Middle Irish versions of Continental theological works and classical tales translated from Latin by the last generations of pre-reform church scholars.124 To this was subsequently added a growing familiarity with the workings of English common law,125 and the translations of Continental saints’ Lives and romances circulating from the fifteenth century onwards. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it appears many poets were quite capable of reading printed English editions for themselves without the need for a prior translation.126 (AD1483). 122 Paul Walsh, The Ó Cléirigh family of Tír Conaill: an essay (Dublin, 1938); Katharine Simms, ‘Late medieval Donegal’ in Donegal Hist. & Soc., pp 183–201, at pp 196–7. See Bernadette Cunningham, ‘The culture and ideology of Irish Franciscan historians at Louvain, 1607–1650’ in Ciarán Brady (ed.), Ideology and the historians, Historical Studies 17 (Dublin, 1991), pp 11–30, 223–7, and P.A. Breatnach, Caoimhín Breatnach and Méidhbhín Ní Urdail (eds), Léann Láimhscríbhinní Lobháin: the Louvain manuscript heritage (Dublin, 2007). 123 Breatnach, Uraicecht na Ríar, pp 102–3; Proinsias Mac Cana, The learned tales of medieval Ireland (Dublin, 1980), p. 41; Myles Dillon (ed.), Lebor na Cert: The Book of Rights (Dublin, 1962), pp 120–3; Knott, Tadhg Dall, no. 30, verses 20–2; Ó Donnchadha, Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe, no. 36. 124 Simms, ‘The brehons of later medieval Ireland’, pp 61– 6; eadem, ‘Bards and barons’, pp 182, 195–6; eadem, ‘Foreign apologues in bardic poetry’ in Seán Duffy and Susan Foran (eds), The English isles: cultural transmission and political conflict in Britain and Ireland, 1100–1500 (Dublin, 2013), pp 139–50. 125 See, for example, the poem ‘Cia so agras cóir um Chruachain’ addressed to Muirchertach O’Neill ostensibly asserting his right to rule Connacht as son of the only daughter and heiress of King Áed mac Feilim O’Conor (d.1274) who held his kingship there by a charter from the English king (ABM, no. 99); or ‘Cia ór cheannchas mo chosnamh’ in which the poet threatens Art O’Conor Faly (fl. 1483) to apply for an English charter of denization unless the chief protects him more effectively – Lambert McKenna, ‘Some Irish bardic poems LXXXV’, Studies, 37 (1948), 84–90. 126 Katharine Simms, ‘Foreign apologues in bardic poetry’, pp 139–50; Mícheál

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A very important part of the poets’ modernizing influence was their mobility. From earliest times customary law gave the poets a privileged position in society that ensured their legal protection in any Irish kingdom through which they travelled. In the case of ordinary landholders it was only by remaining in their home territory that they could draw on the support of kinsmen or overlord to act as oath-helpers in legal hearings, or where an opponent was recalcitrant, obtain the necessary back-up of physical force that would enable a plaintiff to seize a distraint of property from his opponent to oblige him to come to court, or to levy the fine or compensation that the court had already adjudged. In the case of the poet, who frequently travelled far from his own kindred or lord, his use of justified satire was accepted throughout Ireland as a legally recognized means of obtaining redress, and his person was supposed to be guaranteed from attack in any region of the country.127 In a poem to Roalb Mac MacMahon (d.1311), Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide claims to have toured all Ireland testing the comparative liberality of his noble patrons: I have visited far-off Munster, I have addressed the Sons of Carthach; I have ere now been in Cliú of the kings among the Race of Brian Bóraimhe. I searched out the Laighin on my way back; I sought the nobles of Midhe; the visitation of the Connachta was a fruitful wood to me – I beheld the sons of Conchobhar … I adjudged all Leath Chuinn so that there is no man of prowess whom I do not assess. Of all those west and east of the nobles of Ireland that I sought, no-one could defend himself against me except Roalbh …128 The pre-eminent fourteenth-century poet, Gofraid Finn Ó Dálaig, who was familiar with the court of the earls of Desmond and the more urbanized society of Munster, might prefer merely to send a messenger to solicit the patronage of Conchobar O’Donnell, king of Tír Conaill,129 but it is possible his north Munster contemporary, Máel Muire Mág Raith (Magrath), composed his address to Áed Remor Ó Néill (d.1364)130 on the occasion of a general gathering Mac Craith, Lorg na hIasachta ar na dánta grá, Leabhar Taighde 63 (Baile Átha Cliath, 1989); idem, ‘Dánta grá’ in Brian Lalor (ed.), The encyclopedia of Ireland (Dublin, 2003), p. 269. 127 Breatnach, ‘On satire and the poet’s circuit’. 128 Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, pp 178–81 (no. 15, verses 30–3); see Katharine Simms, ‘Bardic poems of apology and reconciliation’ in Liam Mac Amhlaigh and Brian Ó Corcráin (eds), Ilteangach, Ilseiftiúil: Féilsgríbhinn in ómós do Nicholas Williams: a festschrift in honour of Nicholas Williams (Dublin, 2012), pp 175–91, at pp 187–8. The expression ‘defend himself against me’ means exhibiting faultless hospitality and liberality in the face of the poet’s demands, and thus avoiding all danger of unfavourable comparison or satire. 129 ‘A fhir théid i dTír Conaill’: DiD, no. 66. 130 ‘Ní triall corrach as cóir dh’Aodh’, ABM, no. 375. See above, p. 125.

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of poets at that chief ’s stronghold, and a similar feast for poets held by Niall Óc Ó Néill in 1387 may have been the occasion for eulogies addressed to that chief by the eminent Connacht and Munster poets Tadc Óc Ó hUicinn and Eógan Mág Raith respectively.131 At the same time, as revealed by the poem A theachtaire thig ó’n Róimh cited above,132 poets had a vested interest in opposing social change, in encouraging the continuance of old class distinctions, the traditional value set on nobility of blood, and a man’s ‘fame’ or ‘renown’ (clú) which was earned by victory in battle and extravagant displays of hospitality and gift-giving. If these ‘virtues’ ceased to be important to the ruling classes, the poet’s profession became obsolete, and seventeenth-century literature in Irish is full of lamentations at the gradual ebbing of the aristocratic cult of honour and fame, and the concomitant decline in the market for bardic poetry.133 One of the more archaic features of the praise-poet’s profession was the ‘connrad’ or ‘cumann’, the contract between a noble patron and his personal poet,134 often metaphorically referred to in terms of a marriage, with the patron as the poet’s husband,135 or a fosterage, with the poet as the patron’s fosterchild.136 Just as noble children might be reared by a series of foster-parents, and marriages in Gaelic society were not in practice indissoluble,137 so a poet might go through a number of patrons in the course of his career,138 but the relative security of income offered by such a contract made it eagerly sought after. Poets speak of poems delivered to prospective patrons as ‘wooing-gifts’,139 although it was a two-way process, and a really eminent ollam of poetry might tactfully refuse advances from an ambitious patron who did not measure up to his requirements, as two Irish master-poets refused invitations from the Scottish Lords of the Isles.140 The relationship between a Gaelic lord and his personal poet was an extraordinarily close one. The chief ’s poet not only sat beside his master at 131 ‘Ó’n aird tuaidh tig an chabhair’ and ‘Dá roinn chomhthroma ar chrích Néill’, Aithd., nos. 15 and 16. See above, p. 136 and Katharine Simms, ‘Propaganda use of the Táin in the later Middle Ages’, Celtica, 15 (1983), 142–9. 132 Above, pp 357–9. 133 Examples in Bergin, IBP, nos. 9, 26, 28, 37, 42; DiD, no. 115; William Gillies, ‘C’áit ar ghabhadar Gaoidhil’, Éigse, 13 (1970), 203–10. See also Katharine Simms, ‘References to landscape and economy in Irish bardic poetry’ in H.B. Clarke, Jacinta Prunty and Mark Hennessy (eds), Surveying Ireland’s past (Dublin, 2004), pp 145–68, at pp 159–60. 134 Breatnach, ‘The chief ’s poet’; James Carney, The Irish bardic poet (Dublin, 1967). 135 Katharine Simms, ‘The poet as chieftain’s widow: bardic elegies’ in Ó Corráin, Breatnach and McCone (eds), Sages, saints and storytellers, pp 400–11. 136  Katharine Simms, ‘Images for the role of bardic poets’ in Caoimhín Breatnach and Méidhbhín Ní Urdail (eds), Aon don Éigse: essays marking Osborn Bergin’s centenary lecture on bardic poetry (1912) (Dublin, 2015), pp 247–60. 137 See below, pp 438–41. 138  See, for example, Tomás Ó Concheanainn, ‘A feature of the poetry of Fearghal Óg Mac an Bhaird’, Éigse, 15:3 (1974), 235–51. 139 P.A. Breatnach, ‘In praise of Maghnas Ó Domhnaill’, Celtica, 16 (1984), 63–72; Ó Donnchadha, Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe, p. 272; Aithd., no. 40. 140 Bergin, IBP, no. 45; Aithd., no. 29.

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ceremonial feasts, but on these occasions drank from the same cup, and afterwards slept by his side in the same bed. These privileges are less startling if viewed in terms of the furnishings of a king’s house in those days. Jewelled goblets were not plentiful, and it would besmirch the king’s reputation for hospitality, and the reverence due to a learned poet, if the host were to drink from one, and his honoured guest to be given a wooden mether. The word for ‘bed’ used in these contexts is often imdae, ‘a cubicle’, and even the more familiar term lepaid (Mod. Ir. leaba) can bear this wider meaning.141 In the large wattleand-daub drinking-halls of medieval Ireland, the central aisle was occupied by fires, cooking-spits and candelabras, while the walls were lined with seating banks, stuffed with rushes or straw and spread with rugs or skins. These banks against the wall were divided into a series of compartments (imdada), like opera boxes, and there were strict social distinctions as to who shared a compartment with whom, seen in the ideal lay-out of the mythical banqueting hall at Tara, illustrated by diagrams in the twelfth-century Book of Leinster (LL) and late fourteenth-century Yellow Book of Lecan (YBL)142 (see Plates XIV, XV). Lesser entertainers or followers apparently sat on the floor, in front of the guests, as we find in a text in Bretha Nemed: ‘a drisiuc [lower-class bard] is to be placed on his own before a couch at the front of the northern side (of the hall)’, and in a legal commentary: the longbards [‘vessel bards’] are under the feet of everyone in the front part of a house … and the name is due to the small vessel they have with them, i.e., three-edged iron vessels, and they are capable of (holding) a sip of every drink dispensed in their presence.143 As the feast wore to a close, the partitioned benches served in turn as sleeping-chambers for the normally quite intoxicated guests, and it was sometimes the poet’s role to help his master fall asleep on these occasions by relating some tale or other.144 That said, it was common for a poet to lay great emphasis on his privilege of sharing the king’s sleeping compartment, referring to himself as the king’s lennán, or ‘mistress’, sometimes humorously145 and sometimes in terms of passionate devotion to his lord.146 141 RIA Dictionary, pp 383–4, cols 82–3; 428–9, cols 107–9. 142 O’Sullivan, Hospitality, pp 88–94; Simms, ‘Native sources for Gaelic settlement: the house poems’, pp 250–1. See Kaarina Hollo, ‘Conchobar’s sceptre: the growth of a literary topos’, CMCS, 29 (1995), 11– 25: 12–15. 143 Breatnach, Uraicecht na Ríar, pp 35, 38; CIH, p. 1562, lines 5–14; 2219, lines 4–14. Square brackets are mine. 144 Knott, Tadhg Dall, no. 25, verses 20–2. Normally reciting prose tales to send the lord to sleep was the job of the scélaige or professional taleteller – see Miller & Power, Holinshed’s Ir. Chron., p. 114. 145  Simms, ‘Images of the galloglass in poems to the MacSweeneys’ in Duffy (ed.), The world of the galloglass, pp 106– 23, at p. 116. 146 Carney, The Irish bardic poet, pp 13, 21–2; Ó Concheanainn, ‘A feature of the poetry’, pp 241–2.

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Clearly there was no social stigma attached to the use of such homoerotic imagery. References to actual homosexuality or lesbianism do occur in early Irish sources: in the Hiberno-Latin penitentials as one form of unchastity in monks or lay penitents,147 in the Old Irish law tracts, as a reason for a wife to sue for divorce, if practised with serving-boys so that she is deprived of her husband’s marital attentions ‘when it was not necessary for him (mana be deithbir do)’,148 and a chance reference to lesbian activity occurs in an account of a royal just judgement on a case of disputed paternity.149 However such sexual predilections are never associated, as became the case on the Continent from the thirteenth century onwards, with accusations of heresy, arising out of the practices or alleged practices of the Cathars.150 As we have seen, heresy was non-existent or unnoticed in medieval Ulster. It is not until the Counter-Reformation literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that homosexuality is again adverted to as a moral issue.151 Bardic schools presumably offered the same kind of sexual opportunities as any other all-male residential institutions, and perhaps all the more so, as the students were expected to lie on beds (sometimes sharing)152 for long periods in darkened rooms while composing their poems.153 It is possible this may have been a factor in the strict chaperonage Tadc Óc Ó hUicinn received from his elder brother and teacher, Fergal Rúad Ó hUicinn, of whom he says: For my training he would not have me one night away from him. Till he loosed me against the birds, I was ever in one hut with Ó hUiginn.’154 However it seems clear the ‘marriage’ between poet and patron was merely a question of traditional symbolism, perhaps expressing a view that the poet spoke for the king’s territory in the ceremony of royal inauguration, which the learned classes explicitly described as a marriage between the king and the land.155 In 147 Bieler, The Irish penitentials: ‘Finnian’, pp 74–5 (boy with beast: 100 days on bread and water, boy with boy: 1 year; man with boy 3 years, 7 if habitual; oral sex: 3 years, 7 if habitual; lay boy lusting for girl: 20 days; masturbation, 100 days; fornication 1 year); see also pp 96– 7; 102–3 114–15, 126–9, 220–1. 148 Anc. Laws Ire., 5, pp 292–3; CIH, 1, p. 48; Kelly, Early Irish law, p. 74. 149 D.M. Wiley, ‘Niall Frossach’s true judgement’, Ériu, 55 (2005), 19–36. 150 See John Boswell, Christianity, social tolerance, and homosexuality: gay people in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the fourteenth century (Chicago and London, 1980), pp 283–6. 151  Tomás Ó Rathile, Dánta grádha (2nd ed., Cork, 1926), no. 73; Cuthbert Mhág Craith (ed. and trans.), Dán na mBráthar Mionúr (2 vols, Dublin, text, 1967, trans., 1980), no. 9, verses 43–4. 152 DiD, no. 104, verse 4. 153 McManus, ‘The bardic poet as teacher’, pp 97–9. 154 Bergin, IBP, no. 38, verse 18. Bergin points out that the metaphor about the birds is apt because young hawks, like young poets, begin their training in dark rooms. Gofraid Finn Ó Dálaig also states that as his son Eógan’s teacher he did not allow him to spend two nights away from him – DiD, no. 65, verse 37. 155 Breatnach, ‘The chief ’s poet’, p. 42; Damian McManus, ‘“The smallest man in Ireland can reach the tops of her trees”; images of the king’s peace and bounty in bardic poetry’ in Joseph Falaky Nagy

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tracts describing the late medieval inauguration rituals of O’Dowda (Ó Dubda) and O’Conor in Connacht, the poet officiated by handing the king the ‘rod of kingship’ or passing the rod over his head while proclaiming his new title, a rite performed in other territories by a churchman or a vassal chief.156 However a poem from thirteenth-century Ulster suggests the poet there might have had a more ‘hands-on’ role. In an elegy for Magnus O’Cahan, sub-king of Cianacht and Fir na Craíbe (north county Derry), and his kinsman Echmarcach O’Cahan, both killed in the Battle of Down (1260), an anonymous poet recalls his own childhood, when he and his brother, with Bishop Gilla an Coimded Ó Cerballáin, and Echmarcach O’Cahan were fostered together, and they played at inaugurations, he taking the part of the poet, and Echmarcach playing the king: We used to give the chieftainship, in our sports To him when high-spirited youths We and the king on a mound which he disgraced not Going thrice around him. Until he would take me on his back I used to continue to shed tears after him, At all times I was the rider Our horse was [always] Eachmharcach.157 It is unclear whether the second verse in this extract is still referring to the mock inauguration ceremony, but the two verses immediately following this one refer to the play king distributing the wages of submission (tuarastal) to his vassalry (oireacht), and receiving an ode from his pretended ollam ‘although that which I made was not a poem!’, so it seems quite possible that this verse reflects another modified version of the ‘horse’ ritual in an Ulster inauguration.158 Of almost equal interest is the implication that the O’Cahan prince, the bishop and the poet (and his brother) had all been fostered together. One is tempted to suggest that they were attending the early thirteenth-century traditional church school at Derry, since the Irish for ‘foster-father’ (aite, oide) can also mean ‘teacher’.159 There are some other instances of the sons of chieftains or Anglo-Irish nobles being fostered with or taught by learned poets, including apparently Magnus O’Donnell and William Nugent in the sixteenth (ed.), Memory and the modern in Celtic literatures, CSANA Yearbook 5 (Dublin, 2006), pp 61– 117, at pp 61–2. 156  Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 22–33; FitzPatrick, Royal inauguration, pp 5–12. 157 John O’Donovan (ed.), ‘Fearghal Óg Mac an Bhaird’s poem on the Battle of Dun’ in John O’Donovan (ed.), Miscellany of the Celtic Society (Dublin, 1849), pp 404–15, at p. 409; Lambert McKenna, ‘Some Irish bardic poems LXXXII: Leacht carad ó chath Bhriain’, Studies, 36 (1947), 175–80: 176, 179, verse 13. 158 See Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 23–4, and above, p. 291. 159 See RIA Dictionary, p. 32, cols 250–1.

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century,160 but also very probably Earl Gerald ‘the Rhymer’ FitzGerald of Desmond in the fourteenth century.161 Each of these noblemen became not merely literate in the Irish language, but quite gifted poets themselves.162 Conversely Tadc Óc Ó hUicinn refers to growing up from the age of a child (Do hoileadh mé … ó aois leinbh) at the court of Tadc son of Cathal Óc O’Conor of Cairbre in north Sligo, though it seems he may not be referring to actual fosterage with the chief, but to obtaining his first professional placement at a very young age (‘he was my first friend … I was his ollamh and friend’).163 Muiredach Ó Dálaig of Lissadell indicates that he was educated in Connacht when he refers to the river Boyle as his foster-mother, but also claims to have been very young when he obtained his first post as court poet to Domnall Mór O’Donnell (d.1241). ‘From the age of a child’ (ó ais lenaib) he says, he adhered to Domnall Mór, and no other king was friend to him before that. He shared his bed, sat by his shoulder and received the first drink at his feasts.164 Only a very promising member of a prestigious school of hereditary poets could expect to become an official court poet straight after completing his course of study, so the phrase ‘from the age of a child’ may be a slight exaggeration in both of these cases, intended to underline a major professional achievement, rather than a literal reference to fosterage in childhood at the king’s court. It is hard to judge what such constant interaction with a learned companion by way of dinner conversation and ‘sleep learning’ would have had on the literary taste of the patrons themselves, since the patron’s voice is normally only heard if he himself learned to compose poetry which then survived the passing of time. Enthusiastic liberality towards the whole class of versifiers was not a guarantee of discriminating appreciation, and learned poets sometimes betray irritation that a patron rewards the good and the bad alike,165 or they turn this into a topos of praise as demonstrating ungrudging generosity.166 This is a recurrent theme in the Book of Magauran. The Magauran (Mág Shamradáin) chiefs of the tuath of Tellach Echdach (barony of Tullyhaw) in the north-west of the modern county Cavan held the balance of power between O’Rourke’s lordship of west Breifne (approx. modern county Leitrim) and O’Reilly’s territory of east Breifne (county Cavan) in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, and as a result enjoyed a period of unusual prominence during which the chiefs married above their rank socially and had a high political profile in the annals.167 It is probably no coincidence that they were enthusiastic 160  P.A. Breatnach, ‘In praise of Maghnas Ó Domhnaill’, Celtica, 16 (1984), 63–72: 64; Bergin, IBP, no. 35, verse 9. See Gerard Murphy, ‘Poems of exile by Uilliam Nuinseann mac Barúin Dealbhna’, Éigse, 6:1 (1948), 8–15: 15. 161 DiD, no. 67, verses 35, 37; Gearóid Mac Niocaill, ‘Duanaire Ghearóid Iarla’, Studia Hibernica, 3 (1963), 7–59: 9. 162 Ó Rathile, Dánta gradha, nos. 49–53, and see Murphy and Mac Niocaill above, notes 160–1. 163 Aithd., no. 6, verses 11, 15, 23. 164 E.C. Quiggin, Prolegomena to the study of the Irish bards, 1200– 1500 (London [1913], repr. 1984), pp 44–5. 165  Mac Airt, Leabhar Branach, no. 26. 166 Aithd., no. 1, verses 11, 27–8. 167 McKenna, Book of Magauran, p. ix.

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and perhaps indiscriminating patrons of the ‘men of art’ at this time. Brian Magauran (d.1298) was said to pay musicians who sang ready-made lays about the adventures of the Fianna with the price that would normally reward a commissioned eulogy to himself, that is, a horse.168 Magnus (d.1303), his brother and successor in the chieftainship, loved music. We are told he never slept without the bronze strings of harp or tiompán to lull his eyes shut. He bought poems sight unseen, an interesting expression that suggests written scripts were normally viewed and approved before the ceremonial performance. He objected to poems if they were too short, and the poet, in a composition which is itself 47 verses long, jokes that Magnus would listen with pleasure to all 150-odd verses of the Middle Irish poem Ériu ard inis na ríg, a tedious list in ógláchas verse of all the kings to rule Ireland from Noah’s Flood to the coming of St Patrick, giving the length of each man’s reign.169 As in Florence under the Medicis, patronage of the arts was often an indicator of ambition. In the fifteenth century, Áed Buide II O’Neill of Clannaboy (d.1444), who wished to replace his brother in the chieftainship,170 seems to have gone to considerable lengths to woo the prominent Leinster poet Dubthach Eolach Mac Eochada (D. ‘the learned’ McKeogh), when he came to his court for a three-month visit. Dubthach was, he tells us, showered with wealth including drinking-cups and numbers of horses, every member of the family included him in their confidential discourse; when not conversing with the immediate household he was surrounded by a bevy of maidens. Áed Buide himself gave him his friendship (cumann). If he sat like an ordinary guest, against the wall of the house, Áed Buide would come to sit beside him, offering him the honoured place of a personal poet. For the quarter of a year he spent by the harbour of Carrickfergus he never left the house for a longer trip than to go down with Áed to the strand below to watch a hurling match. If he suggested going on a professional visit elsewhere, Áed refused his permission, compensating him financially, we are given to understand, for monopolizing the poet on his northern circuit. Dubthach belonged to a large and well-established family of Leinster poets, and explained that he could not forgo his Leinster heritage (dúthchas) to become attached to Áed’s court permanently, but agreed to dedicate a last verse of praise to Áed at the end of every poem he composed henceforth,171 a privilege regularly granted to favoured patrons by prominent poets. Gofraid Finn Ó Dálaig (‘G. the Fair’, d.1387), many of whose poems end with multiple parting dedications of this kind, charged each chief a horse a year for such contracts.172 As it happened, Mac Eochada was wise to stay in Leinster. Áed 168 McKenna, Book of Magauran, no. 6, verse 7. 169 McKenna, Book of Magauran, no. 11, verses 26–8. See R.I. Best and M.A. O’Brien, The Book of Leinster, 3 (Dublin, 1957), pp 471– 90; R.A.S. Macalister (ed.), Lebor Gabála Érenn: the Book of the Taking of Ireland (5 vols, Dublin, 1938–56), 5, pp 486–531. 170 Above, pp 173–4. 171 Ó Donnchadha, Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buide, no. 2. 172 Carney, The Irish bardic poet, pp 15–16; Ó Concheanainn,

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Buide II was killed after he had forced his brother’s submission, but before his own inauguration, and his elder brother Muirchertach Rúad resumed the reins of power with no very warm feelings towards the poets who had declared Áed Buide’s right to the chieftainship to be superior to his own. Áed Buide’s personal poet, Donnchad Mac an Cnáide, whose obscure surname suggests he was taken into Áed’s employment before that prince had set his sights on becoming chief, bitterly lamented the isolation he suffered after his master’s death, being universally refused ‘friendship/kinship’ (gaol) from the previously snubbed remaining members of Clann Áeda Buide.173 In the fifteenth century, the prince Feidlimid son of Eógan O’Neill (d.1461) was described as owning the largest anthology of poems in Ireland,174 and it would seem probable he was in a position to read these for himself, but in general there are fewer indications of practising amateur poets among aristocrats in Ulster than elsewhere in Ireland before the sixteenth century. After 1500, however, we not only have the extant love poetry composed by Magnus O’Donnell (d.1563), but in odes to Cú Chonnacht Maguire it is claimed that he himself, his kinsmen and the soldiers in the army of Fir Manach were skilled in poetry.175 The mushrooming of Third Order Franciscan foundations across Ulster in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century may have had some influence on the improvement in lay literacy which this implies, since we are told the lay-brothers taught boys in their localities.176 Of course, a poet who lives constantly in company with a warlike chief, and drinks out of his cup at every feast, is as likely to acquire intemperate and violent habits himself as to influence his patron towards a love of literature. The north Sligo poet Tadc Óc Ó hUicinn (d.1448) makes several references to his problems with alcohol,177 and on one occasion drunkenness caused him to utter remarks insulting to his patron at that time, Burke of Clanrickard, for which he then offered a poem free of charge as compensation.178 Tadc’s offence was merely verbal, one annalist when noting his death describes him rather unusually as ‘the affablest and happiest that euer professed the (Dan),’179 but an unnamed eminent ‘A feature of the poetry’. 173 Katharine Simms, ‘Bardic poetry as a historical source’ in Tom Dunne (ed.), The writer as witness, Historical Studies XVI (Cork, 1987), pp 58–75, at p. 64; Ó Donnchadha, Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe, no. 5. 174 AU 3, pp 204–5, AFM 4, pp 1008–9. The word for ‘anthology’ – duanaire – is ambiguous as between ‘poet’ and ‘collection of poetry’, and Mac Carthy in AU translates this entry as meaning that Feidlimid was himself an amateur poet, but RIA Dictionary, p. 253, col. 424, takes the AU entry as referring to the patron’s anthology, as O’Donovan in AFM did. Compare the obit of Feidlimid’s son Brian in AD1482, AU 3, pp 278–81. 175 David Greene, Duanaire Mhéig Uidhir (Dublin, 1972), no. 8, verse 14; no. 9, verses 1–2, 14, 16, 20, 24; no. 20, verse 19; no. 21, verse 8; no. 21, verses 30, 35; no. 23, verses 23–4. 176 Above, p. 320. 177 ‘Cia ghabhas m’anmain re ais’, Lambert McKenna (ed.), Dán Dé (Dublin, 1922), no. 4, verse 16; ‘Anocht sgaoilid na sgola’, Bergin, IBP, no. 38, verse 17. 178 ‘Fada an ráitheise romham’, Aithd., no. 40. 179 John O’Donovan (ed.), ‘The Annals of Ireland, from the year 1443 to 1468, translated from the Irish by … Duald MacFirbis’ in Miscellany of the Irish Archaeological Society, i (Dublin 1846, henceforth

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poet who happened to be sitting beside the noble Tuathal O’Malley (Ó Máille, of the Owles in Mayo) at a feast apparently held in Ulster, where O’Malley went to hire the services of himself and his followers as mercenaries, actually stabbed Tuathal severely, so that he lay ill for some time. Tuathal would have been entitled to a considerable monetary compensation, but he settled for a praisepoem, and the fili congratulates him on the wisdom of his choice. For a passing discomfort he has won immortality for himself and his family, and has demonstrated his high sense of honour in the reverence he showed for the poet’s immune status.180 Tuathal O’Malley was not a reigning chief, but the late sixteenth- to early seventeenth-century poet Fergal Óc Mac an Baird, who seems to have quarrelled with his patrons with more than chance frequency,181 went so far in the course of an argument as to pour a goblet of wine over Cú Chonnacht Maguire (d.1589), the ruler of Fir Manach. Once again the offence was paid for with a poem free of charge, a poem in which grovelling apology takes up more space than the customary eulogy of the chief.182 The praise-poets’ own accounts of the great reverence in which their profession was held and the privileged seat they occupied by the ruler’s side has naturally to be viewed with caution, since their statements were intended quite as much to teach chieftains how they should treat poets as to describe what actually took place, and they frequently justify their own lesser demands by alluding to their mythical prototype, Aithirne ‘the Importunate’ (‘A. ailgesach’), the outrageously haughty and demanding poet who figures in the Ulster sagacycle as testing the tolerance and generosity of a succession of patrons to quite unreasonable limits: ‘a man that asked the one-eyed for his single eye and used to demand the woman in childbed’.183 However we do have indirect testimony in the late fourteenth century on the views of some leading Irish chieftains as to how poets should be treated. Ann. MacFirb.), pp 108–302, at p. 219. 180 T.S. Ó Máille (ed.), ‘A poem to Tuathal Ó Máille’, Revue Celtique, 49 (1932), 166–81 (‘Bráthair don iocht an t-eineach’). See Ann. Conn., pp 416–19, 428–9. The poet’s prophecy of immortality is justified in that this is the only known surviving poem to a male member of the Ó Máille family, though there is another to Sadb Ní Máille, who was probably the wife of Ricard MacWilliam Bourke of Mayo (d.1473) – see Cécile O’Rahilly (ed.), Cath Finntrágha (Dublin, 1962), pp vii–x, 63–4. Similarly the only known medieval poem to the minor chieftain O’Hanlon (Ó hAnnluain) is Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide’s poem of compensation for an insult perpetrated by a lesser poet of his kindred, which also assures O’Hanlon of the immortality his poem will confer – Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, no. 11. 181 Tomás Ó Concheanainn, ‘Dán réitigh ó Fhearghal Óg Mac an Bhaird’, Celtica, 15 (1983), 88–95; Mac Cionaith, Dioghluim dána, no. 90. 182 Greene, Duanaire Mhéig Uidhir, no. 5. See Katharine Simms, ‘Bardic poems of apology and reconciliation’ in Liam Mac Amhlaigh and Brian Ó Corcráin (eds), Ilteangach, Ilseiftiúil: Féilsgríbhinn in ómós do Nicholas Williams: a festschrift in honour of Nicholas Williams (Dublin, 2012), pp 175–91. 183 Whitley Stokes, ‘The Siege of Howth’, Revue Celtique, 8 (1887), 47– 63: 49; Caoimhín Ó Dónaill, Talland Étair: a critical edition with introduction, translation, textual notes, bibliography and vocabulary (Maynooth, 2005), p. 52. Published examples of the

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During his time in Ireland in the spring of 1395 King Richard II decided to cement good relations with the greatest of the chiefs who had submitted to him by knighting them. We know that Niall Óc O’Neill was one of these and valued the ceremony enough to use the title ‘knight by your creation’ in a subsequent letter to the English king.184 The chronicler Froissart’s Anglo-Irish friend ‘Chrystede’ told him: Because the Irish language is as familiar to me as the English … I have been chosen by our lord and king to teach and accustom the four Irish kings, who have sworn obedience for ever to England, to the manners of the English … for he wanted to create them knights. He gave them first a very handsome house in the city of Dublin for themselves and attendants, where I was ordered to reside with them … I lived with them for three or four days without any way interfering, that we might become accustomed to each other … When these kings were seated at table, and the first dish was served, they would make their minstrels and principal servants sit beside them, and eat from their plates and drink from their cups. They told me, this was a praiseworthy custom of their country, where everything was in common but the bed. I permitted this to be done for three days; but on the fourth I ordered the tables to be laid out and covered properly, placing the four kings at an upper table, the minstrels at another below, and the servants lower still. They looked at each other, and refused to eat, saying I had deprived them of their old custom in which they had been brought up.185 This reported reaction of the Irish kings is quite consistent with the Catalan pilgrim’s account of his conversation with Niall Óc O’Neill: ‘It appeared to me from his words that they consider their own customs to be better than ours and more advantageous than any others in the whole world’.186 Froissart’s use of the term ‘minstrels’ to describe the ‘men of art’ involved in this confrontation goes to the heart of the problem, as he would presumably regard it as quite socially acceptable to seat the higher clergy at the kings’ table, even clerics who, like Cardinal Wolsey, were of decidedly lower middle class origins. The poets’ right to enforce their legal rights through the power of the word closely paralleled the church’s system of excommunication. In each case the sentence was preceded by issuing a formal public warning to the offender, naming the perpetrator and the offence.187 With poets this took the form of a poets’ use of Aithirne as a precedent are: Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, no. 11; McKenna, Book of Magauran, no. 27; Aithd., nos. 13, 33; James Carney (ed.), Poems on the Butlers (Dublin, 1945), no. 6; Mac Airt, Leabhar Branach, nos. 59, 61; Lambert McKenna, Iomarbhágh na bhFileadh: the Contention of the Bards (2 vols, London, 1918), 2, no. 28. 184 Curtis, Richard II, pp 136, 216. 185 Johnes, Froissart, 2, pp 579–80. 186 Carpenter, ‘The pilgrim from Catalonia’, p. 111. 187 Breatnach, ‘On satire and the poet’s circuit’,

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poem of mixed praise and reproach (trefhocul) against a chief who defaulted in payment for his poet’s last eulogy, for example,188 or whose soldiers had robbed the poet’s cattle in the course of a military expedition without subsequent apology and monetary compensation.189 If this warning went unheeded, the poet was entitled to utter a full-blown satire. As one could hardly expect to be paid for a satire denigrating one’s former patron, a number of poets vented their anger with a dán lethaíre or ‘half-satire’, that is, a poem praising one patron (who would reward the poet’s composition) and comparing him to his advantage with the object of the poet’s satire. Thus Áed son of Magnus O’Donnell (d.1600), and Theobald son of Walter Bourke were each praised by different authors in contrast to the reviled Conchobar O’Brien, 3rd earl of Thomond, who had hanged a group of poets in county Clare in 1572.190 In the fifteenth century Tomaltach MacDermot (Mac Diarmada, chief of Moylurg, county Roscommon) was praised in contrast to Tomás Mór Maguire (d.1430), king of Fir Manach, who had offended the Scottish poet Gilla Críst Brúilingech, apparently by refusing to patronize him.191 Thomas Clifford, a fourteenth-century mayor of Limerick, was compared to his disadvantage with the chief Mac Briain Ó gCuanach.192 These are among the very few formal satires of lords and chiefs to survive, and the satire they contain is not at all humorous, consisting rather of a series of denigratory statements, the opposite of the eulogistic themes for which poets were normally paid. Just as praise in formal verse of a patron’s good looks, victory in war, hospitable house, prosperous subjects, chaste wife and general popularity was regarded as reinforcing and blessing these qualities, so a satire denying them was credited with the force of a curse. This is most obvious when the satire takes the form of an unfavourable obituary for a man still living, as the Scottish Finnlag the ‘Red Bard’ uttered against Ailín MacDonald (d.1505/9).193 The Clare poet, Tadc mac Dáire, whose cattle had been plundered without compensation by Áed Ruad II (‘Red Hugh’) O’Donnell’s army during the Nine Years War, alleged that a poet’s satire brought defeat in battle and early death,194 and no doubt subsequently took credit for the disaster O’Donnell’s army suffered at Kinsale shortly afterwards, soon followed by the chief ’s early demise. pp 25–32. See especially an Old Irish gloss on the Senchas Már on appropriate sanctions to be applied by different social categories: ‘bell and psalm for the church, hostages for lords, “three utterances” (trifoclad) for poets, distraint for commoners’, ibid., p. 26. 188 Mac Airt, Leabhar Branach, no. 31. 189 McKenna, Book of Magauran, no. 19; Knott, Tadhg Dall, no. 23. 190 Brian Ó Cuív, ‘The earl of Thomond and the poets, AD1572’, Celtica, 12 (1977), 125–45; ‘Éinpheisd ag milleadh Mhumhan’, ABM, no. 206. 191 Watson, Scottish verse, no. vii, pp 46–59. 192 Ann Dooley, ‘Námha agus cara dár gceird’, Celtica, 18 (1986), 125–49. 193 Watson, Scottish verse, no. xvi, pp 134–9. More humorous false elegies are Pádhraic Ó Ciardha (ed.), ‘The lament for Eoghan Mac Criostail’, Irish Sword, 13:53 (1979), 378–81; (anon.), ‘Ab an aonaigh caraid De’, Book of O’Conor Don, f. 27b. 194  DiD, no. 95. 195 Liam Breatnach, ‘An Aoir sa Ré Luath’ in P. Ó Fiannachta (ed.), An Aoir, Léachtaí Cholm Cille XVIII (Má Nuad, 1988), pp 11–19, at pp 13–14; CIH, 5, pp 1564–5; Rudolf Thurneysen,

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The full rite of glám dícenn or mortal satire as described in Middle Irish sources involved mounting a hill on the boundary of seven estates in the company of members of the other six grades of poetry and standing at sunrise with the wind blowing from the north, their backs to a whitethorn bush and each man’s face turned to his own territory, with the face of the ollam towards the offending king, holding in his hand a sling-stone, and according to some versions a clay image of the object of his satire, each man stabbing the image with thorns from the tree, singing a verse of satire in the metre of his grade and then laying stones and images at the foot of the thorn bush. If the satire was justified, the earth would swallow the king, his wife, his son, his horse, his weapon, his armour and his dog, each of which had been satirized by one of the seven grades. If the satire was unjustified, the mound on which they were standing would swallow the poets.195 It seems somewhat unlikely that in the late sixteenth century the head of a poetic school would have performed such a ritual. Yet strangely a certain link between this rite and excommunication by the church can be seen in the register of Primate Nicholas Fleming (d.1416) where a letter from the primate to the bishop and clergy of Raphoe orders them in 1410 to excommunicate and place under interdict certain unnamed persons: sprinkling blessed water to put to flight the demons by which they are held as if in cords … then they are to approach the doors of the church, with clerks and parishioners, to terrify them, casting three stones towards their dwelling, as a sign of the eternal malediction of God upon Dathan and Abiron, whom the earth swallowed whole.196 Dathan and Abiron, or Abiram, according to the Book of Numbers, Chapter 16, were swallowed up by the earth for rebellion against God’s message as proclaimed by Moses, and their fate was a test of the truth of Moses’ inspiration: ‘Mittelirische Verslehren’ in Whitley Stokes and Ernst Windisch (eds), Irische Texte, 3rd ser., pt 1 (Leipzig, 1891), pp 1–182, pp 96–7; F.N. Robinson, ‘Satirists and enchanters in early Irish literature’ in David G. Lyon and George F. Moore (eds), Studies in the history of religions presented to Crawford Howell Troy (New York, 1912), pp 95–130 – reprinted in John Matthews (ed.), The bardic source book (London, 1998), pp 134–58, at p. 140; Douglas Hyde, A literary history of Ireland (2nd ed., London, 1967), pp 242–3; Eugene O’Curry, On the manners and customs of the ancient Irish: a series of lectures delivered by the late Eugene O’Curry, ed.W.K. Sullivan (3 vols, London and New York, 1873), 2, p. 217; P.L. Henry, Saoithiúlacht na SeanGhaeilge (Baile Átha Cliath, 1978), p. 56. A noteworthy parallel is the account in the Tripartite Life of Patrick of a troop of cáinti (Latin ‘praecones’) otherwise called áesa cerdd (‘men of art’) or drúith (‘buffoons’), who falsely shamed St Patrick with insistent demands for food he did not have to hand, and were swallowed by the earth (after receiving food, so that the saint’s honour remained unblemished) – Whitley Stokes, The Tripartite Life of Patrick (2 vols, London, 1887), 1, pp 202–5. 196  Smith, Reg. Fleming, pp 125–6. ‘aquam benedictam asperiganda ad effugiandum demones qui eosdem tenent sic legatos ut in suis laqueis chatenatos … quo facta ad januas ecclesiarum una cum clericis et parochianis accedentes ad

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages If these men die the common death of all men, or if they be visited after the visitation of all men; then the Lord hath not sent me. But if the Lord make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth and swallow them up, with all that appertain unto them, and they go down quick into the pit; then shall ye understand that these men have provoked the Lord.197

Being swallowed by the earth was frequently reported as the fate of those who defied the will of Irish saints, sometimes with explicit references to the precedent of Dathan and Abiron,198 and it seems as if Primate Fleming was encouraging the use of local customs to reinforce the more standard rites of excommunication against obstinate sinners ‘to terrify them’. Enforcing legal claims by the power of the word alone did not always work out in practice for either churchmen or poets. Like the poets, the persons of ordained clergy were supposed to be immune from attack by Christian laymen, but in 1407 Brian Óc of the Clann Henry Aimréid O’Neills laid violent hands on Bishop John Ó Flannabra of Derry, robbed him of clothing, horses and other goods, bound his hands and tore the rings from his fingers, while some of the clerics in his company were actually killed.199 Already in 1397 Primate Colton had issued letters of excommunication against Brian Óc’s uncle and father, Domnall and Brian Mór, the sons of Henry Aimréid O’Neill, together with other local rulers for usurping the rights of the Bishopric of Derry, at that time still vacant.200 Clann Henry were engaged in building up a local lordship on the borderlands between Tír Eógain and Tír Conaill at that time, but by 1407 Domnall son of Henry Aimréid had seized the kingship of all Tír Eógain and was engaged in a civil war with Eógan, son of the previous king Niall Óc O’Neill, this latter prince being supported by Maguire and O’Donnell.201 Brian Óc’s outrage against the bishop of Derry may have been connected to this war. Subsequent events proved that the privileged status of a poet was no more protection in this war than that of a bishop. In 1432, King Domnall son of Henry Aimréid O’Neill was assassinated by the O’Cahans of Cianacht and Fir na Craíbe (county Derry), and his cousin and rival Eógan O’Neill was inaugurated as the new king of Tír Eógain. eorum terrorem ut citius rediant ad ecclesiae unitatem iii lapides versus eorum habitationes projiciendo in signum maledictionis eterne quam Deus dedit Datan et Abiron quos vivos terra absorbuit.’ 197 Numbers 16:29–30 (AV). The Vulgate version reads: ‘si consueta hominum morte interierint et visitaverit eos plaga qua et ceteri visitari solent, non misit me Dominus. Sin autem novam rem fecerit Dominus ut aperiens terra os suum degluttiat eos et omnia quae ad eos pertinent descenderintque viventes in infernum scietis quod blasphemaverint Dominum.’ 198 Stokes, The Tripartite Life, 1, pp 36–7, 92–3, 130–1, 204–5; 2, pp 454–5, 562–3; Plummer, Vit. Sanct. Hib., 1, pp 79, 85; Plummer, Bethada Náem nÉrenn, 1, pp 30, 37, 41, 237; 2, pp 29, 36, 40, 230. 199 Smith, Reg. Fleming, pp 50–1. 200 Reeves, Acts of Archbishop Colton, pp 50– 1; Porter, ‘The metropolitan visitation’, p. 235. 201 See above, pp 153–4.

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During the civil war much of the western borders of Tír Eógain, the home territory of the Clann Henry, had been overrun by Niall Garb II O’Donnell, ruler of Tír Conaill. Once Niall Garb was captured by the English in 1434, Eógan O’Neill and his sons immediately began a campaign of reconquest of the area, driving Nechtain O’Donnell, the tánaiste or deputy chief of Tír Conaill, into an alliance with Brian Óc, the remaining leader of Clann Henry Aimreid. However, Brian Óc O’Neill, in the wake of the resounding victory of Sliab Truim (‘Bessy Bell’ mountain, county Tyrone) won by Eógan and his sons over Nechtain and Brian Óc in 1435, tried to negotiate a separate peace for himself, entering O’Neill’s head-quarters under a safe-conduct guaranteed by the new ollam of poetry, Conchobar Ruad Mac Con Mide. Conchobar had only just succeeded to his office on the death of Máel Ísa Mac Con Mide ‘ollam and chief poet to O’Neill’ the previous year.202 O’Neill’s warlike sons Henry and Áed of the Fews, however, disregarded the safe-conduct, and seized Brian Óc and his two sons, chopping one hand and one foot off each man. Their ollam Conchobar Rúad Mac Con Mide was outraged, and in the highest traditions of poetic integrity uttered justified satires against his own employers. We do not have the texts of his satires, but we do have a strange elegy he composed at the time for Brian Óc’s foot and hand, which had been ceremonially buried in the churchyard at Derry.203 Instead of experiencing alarm at the justified satire of a noble ollam, however, Eógan O’Neill and his sons banished the poet to Connacht and seized his landed estate. Far from being swallowed by the earth, suffering illhealth or defeat in battle, Henry O’Neill succeeded his father as king and lived to a ripe old age, eventually dying in 1489 after some years of retirement. Eighteen years after the initial quarrel, presumably therefore in 1453, Conchobar Rúad Mac Con Mide composed a poem seeking reconciliation with Henry son of Eógan O’Neill, and the return of his ‘charter-land’ and his office (M’fearann cairte re cois m’feadhma) as hereditary ollam (ollam dúthaig).204 No other poems by Conchobar to Henry are recorded, suggesting the poet’s petition may have been unsuccessful, but after Henry O’Neill’s inauguration (1455), a eulogy was addressed to him by Brian Rúad Mac Con Mide,205 who had earlier been poet to Nechtain O’Donnell (d.1452), king of Tír Conaill.206 It is possible a compromise had been reached by returning the ollam’s lands to Brian rather than Conchobar. Over a century later Eochaid Ó hEódusa recounted the tradition that Brian Rúad Mac Con Mide refused an initial invitation from Henry O’Neill to become his 202 AFM 4, pp 900–1 (AD1434). 203 ‘Ionmhuin taisi a-tá a nDoire’, ABM, no. 288. See Ann. Conn., pp 476–7; ALC 2, pp 156–7; AU 3, pp 138–9 (AD1435). 204  ‘Cionnas do roichfinn rí Oiligh’, Ó Riain, ‘Dán Réitigh le Conchobhar Ruadh Mac Con Midhe’, pp 66, 68, verses 26, 33. 205 ‘Teamhair gach baile i mbí rí’, ABM, no. 464; see Katharine Simms, ‘“The king’s friend” – O’Neill, the crown and the earldom of Ulster’ in Eng. & Ire., ed. Lydon, pp 214–36, at pp 227–8. 206 O’Keeffe, ‘Poems on the O’Donnells’, Ir. Texts II, pp 35–49.

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ollam or even to compose one quatrain for him, on the grounds that he was too young, but accepted the position at a later date, when he received whatever estate or land he demanded (a bhreth féin d’fhonn is d’fherann).207 This memory could very well reflect Brian’s initial solidarity with his kinsman in the face of O’Neill’s injustice. However, discussion of the tax-free estate with which the ollam of poetry was commonly endowed belongs with the following chapter, in the context of the general endowment of Irish ‘men of learning’ or ‘men of art’ (aes eladan).

207 Greene, Duanaire Mhéig Uidhir, no. 23, verses 8–17.

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CHAPTER

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Other Ulster ‘men of art/learning’ (áes eladan)

L A N D S E N D OW I N G T H E

‘MEN

O F A RT ’

The whole episode of the expulsion of Conchobar Rúad Mac Con Mide in 1434/5 raises the question of the estates with which poets and other learned classes were endowed. In a preliminary survey of the counties of Monaghan, Fermanagh and Cavan carried out in 1607 by the Attorney-General Sir John Davies with an eye to the subsequent Ulster plantation, he classified the different estates in Fermanagh into land ‘chargeable with M’Guire’s rent1 and other contributions of the country’ on the one hand and ‘free land’ on the other: Touching the free land, we found it to be of three kinds; Church land or termon land, as the Irish call it; secondly, the mensall land of M’Guire; thirdly, lands given to certain septs privileged among the Irish, viz., the lands of the chroniclers, rhymers, and galloglasses.2 If we try to go back as far as the Old Irish law tracts to establish the origin of this custom of setting aside some tax-free land in each territory for the support of learning, the information is quite vague. Old Irish law focuses not on landownership as such, but on honour-price (lóg n-enech), a financial measure of a person’s status in society which for ordinary landowners was based both on land and on property in stock and other goods.3 References to the remuneration of the learned classes in the law tracts, while they focus mainly on their privileges and on moveable goods, do seem to assume the possession of a certain amount of land for the higher grades. For example, an Old Irish passage on the refection of judges, which may once have formed part of the lost text Cáin Phátraic,4 speaks of the judge of a tuath’s entitlement to ‘his day’s ploughing, his day’s reaping, his day’s fencing’.5 The higher grades of poets are elsewhere associated with a treb (‘house, farm, holding’),6 and are apparently expected to inherit 1 i.e., ‘cís’ = ‘tax, tribute’. 2 Morley, Ire. under Eliz. & Jas I, p. 364. 3 Kelly, Early Irish law, pp 7–10; Charles-Edwards, ‘Críth Gablach and the law of status’, pp 63–73. See also Katharine Simms, ‘Nomadry in medieval Ireland: the origins of the creaght or caoraigheacht’, Peritia, 5 (1986), 379–91: 387 on the status of a man with stock and no land, or land and no stock. 4 Breatnach, Companion, pp 52, 221. 5 Liam Breatnach, ‘Lawyers in early Ireland’ in Hogan and Osborough (eds), Brehons, serjeants and attorneys, pp 1–13, at p. 8. 6 RIA Dictionary, p. 604, cols 280–1.

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family land as well as the practice of poetry if they are to qualify for high professional status, for example: ‘Noble is the serthonn, the noblest of permanent (established) bards, a member of a strong household (ball do threibh threin) … so that every fire in his household might be a taking possession (of an inheritance – armadh gach tene ina treibh teallac); for he who is not the child of a noble, or a poet, or a learned churchman, sues for only half honour-price until he serve learning doubly’.7 An interesting aspect is that the judge’s entitlements are said to be owed to him by the túath itself, not by the local king, and similarly in the Old Irish Bretha Nemed material, the dues of the poets are said to be owed by the Féni, the ordinary landowners and taxpayers, not the ruler: The counter-obligations of the Féni are arduous … the due of the poets is fully noble, the true tribute of every produce is given according to the soil and ground of the requests of the people from them. Noble is a hound (and) a claim on land for three horses (saor cuim, cuid i treach tire); (as for) the next in rank to the serthonn, one is to go as far as eighty(?) and eight people, in addition to a horse and a hound.8 In the later medieval and early modern period the origin of estates held by individual learned families seems to have been quite varied. It is interesting that Conchobar Rúad Mac Con Mide refers to his estate as his ‘charter-land’ (ferann cairte), held together with his office. To historians accustomed to thinking in terms of a feudal system, ‘charter-land’ might suggest immediately the idea of a specific grant made at a certain point in time by a recorded donor, but the Irish learned classes made more figurative use of the expression. The Royal Irish Academy Dictionary suggests ‘lawful estate’ as a translation for ferann cairte.9 Metaphorically it seems to be quite a strong expression for land held by inalienable right, or hereditary land, since Mac Con Mide in the verse immediately following describes the whole of Ireland as in the ‘charters’ of the Uí Néill, while a religious poem refers to the seven-foot measure of a man’s grave as his ferann cairte,10 the only land in the world he can certainly claim as his, that can not be taken away from him. The late sixteenth-century tract on the ‘Right of Ó Néill’ over the province of Ulster records that the head of the Mac Con Mide family held an estate called ‘the Reciter’s Land’ (Ferann an Recaire) at Loch Í Máeldubáin near the village of Ardstraw, and on occasions when Ó Néill and his retinue lodged in Ardstraw, Mac Con Mide was bound to supply them with their night’s supper.11 One or two night’s lodging was a service that 7 Breatnach, Uraicecht na Ríar, p. 46. 8 Ibid., p. 24. 9 RIA Dictionary, pp 98, col. 50; 300, col. 87. 10 ‘Fód m’uaighe m’fhearann cairte’, ABM, no. 238. 11 Dillon, ‘Ceart Uí Néill’, pp 8–9; Éamon Ó Doibhlín, ‘Ceart Uí Néill’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 5 (1969–70), 324–58: 345– 7; Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, p. 2. Ó Doibhlín has suggested that the Baronscourt Demesne in that locality is called after a pre-plantation place-name based on the Irish word

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might be exacted by chieftains from lands that were otherwise free of tax or billeting, such as church lands,12 and the name of the estate seems to bear out Mac Con Mide’s description of the land as both hereditary property (ferann cairte), and historically attached to his office of ollam. The Mac Con Mide family claimed to be genealogically a part of the Cenél Eógain,13 and might even have belonged to the Cenél Múáin branch occupying the lands where their estate was situated. It is not impossible that the Mac Con Mide family began as hereditary landowners in that area before specializing in poetry and thus earning exemption from ordinary taxation. In the Book of Lecan version of the ‘Customs of Uí Maine’ (east county Galway) we are explicitly told that the celebrated family of brehons or experts in Irish customary law, the Meic Áedacáin, were ‘tributaries of Clann Ceallaigh … until they became Ollamhs to the arch-chief ’,14 that is, ordinary taxpaying landowners subject to the Uí Chellaig (O’Kelly) kings of Uí Maine before their pursuit of a learned profession earned them exemption. Similarly it appears the Ó Dálaig poets in Meath originated as the chieftains of a tuath within that province.15 In a poem to the fourteenth-century Meath chieftain, Rúaidri O’Molloy (Ó Máelmuaid), the then head of the Ó Dálaig family, Aengus Ruad Ó Dálaig, speaks of leaving his Uí Dálaig kindred (ciniud, muinnter) and his Meath homeland (dúthaig) to take service with O’Brien of Thomond, unless O’Molloy is prepared to abandon his quarrel with him. The two families of Ó Dálaig and Ó Máelmúaid, he points out, are kinsmen, both descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages.16 These possible examples of hereditary lay landowners developing into hereditary learned families and thus acquiring tax-free status may have been the exception rather than the rule, with the more common patterns being an origin as learned hereditary churchmen, or learned families brought in from outside a territory to be settled on the king’s own mensal lands as officers of his household. The Ó Cléirig family of poets and chroniclers, like the Uí Dálaig, claimed a noble ancestry as kings of Uí Fiachrach Aidne in south Galway from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, but they lost their territory to the incoming AngloNorman conquerors. According to the genealogical compilation of the seventeenth-century Cú Coigcríche Ó Cléirig, a branch of his family had moved to Mayo whence they only arrived in Tír Conaill in the course of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. Niall Garb II Ó Domnaill (d.1439) was said ‘barn’ which in Cormac’s Glossary is translated ‘recaire’ or ‘reciter’, op. cit., p. 347. 12 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 131–2; Simms, ‘Guesting and feasting’, p. 80, and see Mac Con Mara’s rental in James Hardiman, ‘Ancient Irish deeds’, RIA Transactions, 15 [Antiquities] (1825–8), 2–95: 43–8; James Frost, The history and topography of the county of Clare (Dublin, 1893), pp 36–9. 13  Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, p. 2. 14  John O’Donovan, The tribes and customs of Hy-Many, commonly called Kelly’s Country (Dublin, 1843), p. 63. See Simms, ‘The brehons of later medieval Ireland’, pp 57–9. 15 See Simms, ‘Literacy and the Irish bards’, pp 241–2; ALC 1, pp 168–9; AFM 3, pp 66–7 (AD1185). 16  Lambert McKenna, ‘Some Irish bardic poems LXXXVII: Ceangail do shíoth riom a

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to have granted Diarmait na Trí Scol17 Ó Cléirig the estate of Creevagh in the parish of Kilbarron and barony of Tirhugh. This was said to be in addition to lands Diarmait inherited from the previous ollam of history for Tír Conaill, Matha Ó Sgingín (d.1402),18 whose daughter was held to have married an Ó Cléirig, lands which may also have been located in Tirhugh. A number of additional landholdings in the parishes of Kilbarron and Templecarne are described as belonging to the Ó Cléirig family, one originally the property of the Cistercian monastery of Assaroe, others said to be the gift of O’Donnell.19 The genealogist uses the somewhat unusual term fondúiri, which the Academy Dictionary renders ‘original owner, freeholder’,20 to describe his kinsmen’s status in relation to these lands. In somewhat similar circumstances to the petition of Conchobar Rúad Mac Con Mide, Cú Coigcríche Ó Cléirig about the year 1546 quarrelled with the O’Gallagher (Ó Gallachair) family, was forced into exile, and complained that he had been deprived of the ‘charter-land’ granted to his family by the warriors of Tír Conaill (ó chath Bernois).21 Thomas Cannon has argued that the whole barony of Tirhugh constituted the mensal lands of the kings of Tír Conaill, and was thus at the disposal of the O’Donnells to endow their household retainers or lucht tige, including the ‘men of art’, not only the Uí Chléirig but also the Mac an Baird poets who gave their name to Ballymacaward in the parish of Kilbarron.22 Both as mensal lands of the king or as church lands, these estates fell into the categories defined as tax-free even before they were granted to ‘men of art’. Clearly neither the Ó Sgingin family, who had earlier served as erenaghs of Ardcarne in Roscommon,23 nor the Uí Chléirig nor the Meic an Baird poets could be factually described as ‘original owners’ of the lands in Tirhugh, and the difference of opinion between the ‘men of art’ and their overlords as to whether they could be legitimately expelled from such lands recalls the difference of opinion between the bishops and their erenaghs during the Plantation period as to whether the church families were freeholders (dúthchasaigh, ‘doughasa’) under the bishops’ authority, or actual tenants on the bishops’ land.24 The experience of the Uí Chléirig would suggest that as well as a process by which families of churchmen, who once combined clerical and secular learning in the unreformed church schools, were allowed to remain on the same lands as Ruaidhrí’, Studies, 37 (1948), 317–25. 17 That is Diarmait ‘of the Three Schools’ – said to be so called because he ran schools of léiginn or Latin learning, senchas or history, and dán or praise poetry. See below, note 19. 18 AFM 4, pp 774–5. 19 Séamus Pender, ‘The O’Clery Book of Genealogies’, Anal. Hib., 18 (Dublin, 1951), 112–17; translation in John O’Donovan, The genealogies, tribes and customs of Hy-Fiachrach (Dublin, 1844), pp 72–81. 20  RIA Dictionary, p. 325, col. 289. 21 ‘Ar bfearonn cairte o chath Bernois . do benadh dhinn doirbh an bhreath’, from the poem ‘Dlighidh file faghail aisig’, ABM, no. 177. See Walsh, The Ó Cléirigh family of Tír Conaill, pp 11–12. 22 Tomás Ó Canann, ‘A forgotten medieval placename’, Donegal Annual, 38 (1986), 19–46: 39. 23 Ann. Conn., pp 8–9, 182–3 (AD1224, 1289). 24 Above, p. 288; Jefferies, ‘Papal letters’, pp 98–9; Jefferies, ‘Erenaghs and termonlands’.

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tenants of their local bishop and continued the study of secular learning in ‘bardic’ schools, we should also envisage circumstances where masters of bardic learning were introduced onto church lands as new tenants, in order that they might hold their estates tax-free. It has been noted in the case of the coarb of Fenagh that while the office of coarb or erenagh was normally hereditary, one family might die out or be displaced by another.25 Fergal Muimnech Ó Duibgennáin came from a family of senchaidi or historians based east of the Shannon in the present county Leitrim, but in 1339 he crossed the Shannon, and built a church for St Lasair of Kilronan in what is now county Roscommon. The presence of a neighbouring holy well dedicated to St Lasair suggests this was a pre-existing church site and the Uí Duibgennáin subsequently compiled a ‘Life of St Lasair’ which laid emphasis on this female saint’s advanced scholarly accomplishments.26 Fergal Muimnech proceeded to establish a hereditary erenaghy or coarbship there for himself and his descendants, combining this church office with that of ollam in history (senchas) to the local lord, MacDermot (Mac Diarmata) of Moylurg. On noting his death in 1357 the Annals of Ulster include a verse that describes him as a praise-poet (fer dána), historian (senchaid), ollam and erenagh.27 As with hereditary coarbs and erenaghs elsewhere, some members of Fergal Muimnech’s family subsequently served as ordained vicars in the parish of Kilronan,28 while others are described simply as secular historians.29 Middle Irish legal glosses and commentaries raise the possibility that re-using vacant church lands to endow schools without clerical obligations for the head of the establishment may have ante-dated the twelfth century. As noted above,30 a passage of commentary on the tract Uraicecht Becc suggested that the unordained erenagh of a church could claim the full honour-price attached to the church’s hierarchical status if he employed either a bishop or the lector of a church school (fer léigind). Glosses on the Sechtae or Heptads discuss the disqualification of: a church in which there is a lay ‘erennach’ without being rebuked or blamed by the abbot who is over him, or by the bishop; for there is no honour-price for the lay ‘erennach’, until he has done penance and paid eric, and until he has undertaken to submit to the law of tonsure.31 25 Walsh, Ir. men of learning, pp 50–3. 26 Lucius Gwynn (ed.), ‘The Life of St Lasair’, Ériu, 5 (1911), 73–109. 27 Ann. Conn., pp 282–3, 300–1, 314–15; AFM 3, pp 564–5, 590–1, 610– 13 (AD1339, 1347, 1357); AU 2, pp 486–7, 504–5 (AD1347, 1357); Ann. Clonm., pp 293, 320 (AD1339, 1398); Walsh, Ir. men of learning, pp 1–2, 5–7. 28  AFM 3, pp 610–11, 624–5 (AD1357, 1362). 29 AFM 4, pp 846–7, 868–9, 890–1, 1218–19 (AD1420, 1426, 1432, 1495). 30 Above, p. 276. 31 Anc. Laws Ire., 5, pp 122–3. Ceall a mbi aircinnech tuata cin cairiugh no cin cursachad don ap bis uasa, no don esbocc; uair ni fil eneclann don airchindech no go ropinne & co roerca & co ro gab do laim tiachtain fo dliged foltmaisi: CIH, 1, p. 2, ll. 5–7.

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As we have seen in the chapter on the church, acceptance of tonsure alone did not guarantee that an erenagh was actually in orders. The later commentary on this passage adds: There not being students in it, causes it; if there are students in it, he is unlawful though he submits to his rebuke, but he does not submit to his rebuke from the abbot of the ‘annoit’ church.32 This could be interpreted as saying that the erenagh who runs a school on church land should not merely agree to be tonsured, but should accept the authority of the mother-church of his establishment. A further gloss on another type of disqualified church has a possibly significant passage: A church in which is not found acceptance of canonical hours … it might not be unlawful in the wisdom orders (na graidh eccna) even if they did not  frequent a church, because they have tutorship of students over against it.33 Just as erenaghs had to maintain a minimal clerical character, fulfil their function of guardianship in relation to their local church and render dues and obedience to the bishop in order to maintain their hereditary right to the land they occupied, so it would seem a family of hereditary poets would have to continue to produce ‘men of art’ in each generation in order to justify their occupation of poets’ lands, although the Old Irish law tracts speak rather of their inheritance of privileged status than privileged lands. The most explicit claim to lands by an Ulster poet comes very late indeed, shortly before the year 1680, when the poet Seumus Ó hUid (‘James Hood’) addressed a petition in verse to Cormac O’Neill of Clandeboy claiming that ten townlands in county Antrim in the vicinity of Toomebridge had been the uncontested property (‘sealbha’) of his family for 800 years in their capacity as hereditary ollamain to the kings of the area. He asks Cormac to intercede on his behalf with Rose, Marchioness of Antrim, Cormac’s first cousin, apparently hoping she might persuade the Marquis of Antrim to allow Ó hUid some compensation for the loss of his family’s long-standing tenancy of these lands. The appeal was made in verse to demonstrate that the Ó hUid family had maintained their poetic profession to that day, and thus their right to the lands that endowed it.34 If Seumus’s claim of ten townlands, or estates spread across 32 Anc. Laws Ire., 5, pp 122–3. Neambeth mic leigind indti fodera; dia mbeth mic leibinn [sic] innti, is indligthech-som, ce daim a cairiugud, & ni daim cairudh d’ab annoiti: CIH, 1, p. 2, ll. 8–9. 33 Anc. Laws Ire., 5, pp 124–5. CELL OCNA FRITHAIRITHER TRATHA … conabu hindligthech na graidh eccna cin co hathathadais [sic] eclais, uair ata tria … [?] leighind aco ’na haige; CIH, 1, p. 2, ll. 28, 32–3. 34 J.H. Lloyd, ‘From the Book of Clanaboy’ in

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ten townlands, is an accurate reflection of the Uí Uid holdings they appear to have been well-endowed in their day. No other poem survives attributed to an author of this surname, although there is one enthusiastic notice in the Annals of Ulster for 1485 concerning Brian Ó hUid ‘an honoured poet of Trian Congail’ (fer dána righmiadhach do Trian-Conghail), who was killed by the son of Mac Eogain, in all likelihood a member of the Scottish bardic family of Mac Eogain, who were possibly an off-shoot of the Irish Uí Eogusa of Fir Manach.35 Perhaps the wide dissemination of the Uí Uid lands reflects the family’s long tenancy of the area. It is possible that most of their authors may have been brúilingecht poets. While Séamus’s own poem approximates to full dán dírech standards, in the second half of the seventeenth century bardic schools were effectively at an end and instead he could have had access to printed and manuscript books giving instructions on the correct composition of dán dírech.36 At the same time the mobility of the learned classes, and of poets in particular meant that not all land endowing scholarship could be hereditary, or could remain hereditary within a particular family, even if they produced practitioners of their art in each generation. Official legal custom held that the king in each territory controlled the nomination of the ollam of poetry,37 history or other discipline, and competition between ‘men of art’ for the top position could be literally cut-throat. Under the year 1394 the Four Masters record that ‘Tadhg Ó hEachaidhéin, a learned poet, was slain by the sons of Cú Chonnacht Ó Dálaigh, [in a squabble] about the ollamship of Ó Néill’, and in 1408 the Uí Dálaig killed another Ó hEchaidéin (O’Haughian) poet while he was on a professional tour of Connacht.38 The Uí Echaidéin were local Ulster poets, and the Uí Dálaig were more prestigious outsiders. The Uí Dálaig in question could have come from the Breifnech section of this famous family, a moderately well-known branch otherwise associated with the O’Reilly chieftains of east Breifne (county Cavan),39 but their violent attacks on their Ulster rivals would seem to have won them some foothold in Tír Eógain, judging by the place-name Ballygawley (‘Baile Uí Dálaig’ = ‘Ó Dálaig’s townland’), on the edge of O’Neill’s Lucht Tige or mensal lands.40 Often it would seem chieftains allotted a new poet whatever vacant lands came to hand. In Scotland Muiredach Ó Dálaig (fl. 1213) complained to Amlaib Mac Muiredaig of Lennox that the previous earl of Lennox had granted him a farm Osborn Bergin and Carl Marstrander (eds), Miscellany presented to Kuno Meyer (Halle a. S., 1912), pp 53–60; Ó Donnchadha, Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe, pp 127–9. For discussion see Ó Ceallaigh, Gleanings, pp 94–7. 35 AU 3, pp 298–9 (AD1485). See McLeod, Divided Gaels, pp 70–2. 36 Parthalán Mac Aogáin, Graiméir Ghaeilge na mBráthar Mionúr (Dublin, 1968), pp 82–106; Tomás Ó Flannghaile, De prosodia hibernica (Dublin, 1908). 37 Aithd., no. 32, verse 5; Simms, ‘Literacy and the Irish bards’, p. 243 and note 38. 38 AFM 4, pp 734–5, 796–7 (AD1394, 1408). 39 O’Donovan, Tribes of Ireland, pp 4, 9; Carney, Poems on the O’Reillys, p. 309. 40 Diarmaid Ó Doibhlin, ‘Tyrone’s Gaelic literary legacy’ in Tyrone Hist. & Soc., pp 403–32, at p. 422.

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on superior lands, nearer to the earl’s seat, and unless Amlaib changed his present allocation for something better, Muiredach would leave to seek a patron in Ireland.41 Similarly the very talented poet Eochaid Ó hEogusa complained that Áed Maguire (d.1600), chief of Fir Manach, had given him a farm in an undesirable frontier position, and demanded a change.42 This custom of hereditary tenancy for families who continued to practise their ancestral profession, combined with the mobility of the more outstanding ‘men of art’ throughout Ireland, produced a pattern in which families of modest attainments were located in a single tuath, while the products of the larger schools spread across the island to establish branches in a number of different provinces. We have already seen that a branch of the Mac an Baird poets moved from Uí Maine in east Galway to settle under the more powerful O’Donnell kings of Tír Conaill in the course of the fifteenth century, but another branch of the Meic an Bhaird became court poets to the MacMahon kings of Airgialla (county Monaghan).43 The Ó hUicinn landholdings in north Connacht have been detailed by Eleanor Knott,44 and since they lived in a border area which often came under the rule of the O’Donnell kings, they did not acquire new abodes in the northern province, but they addressed their eulogies to patrons from both Ulster and Connacht, and on occasion from Munster also.45 The Meic Con Mide poets usually confined their addresses to Ulster patrons, but their greatest ollam, Gilla Brigte, was also patronized by the warrior king of Connacht, Áed mac Feidlim O’Conor (d.1274).46

SENCHAIDI

(HISTORIANS)

Similarly there were more famous and less famous schools of historians or senchaidi. ‘Historian’ may be a somewhat misleading term for this profession in Gaelic Ireland, but simply to describe senchaidi as genealogists would also be inaccurate. Fergus Kelly’s phrase ‘the custodians of tradition’47 is more attractive, but underplays the creative nature of some of their work, and perhaps the nineteenth-century phrase ‘antiquaries’ is as good a rendering as any. The Old Irish senchae may have originated simply as an ‘oldest inhabitant’ in a 41 Brian Ó Cuív, ‘A poem attributed to Muireadhach Ó Dálaigh’ in James Carney and David Greene (eds), Celtic studies: essays in memory of Angus Matheson, 1912–1962 (London, 1968), pp 92–8. 42 Bergin, IBP, no. 33; Carney, The Irish bardic poet, pp 22–3. 43 Walsh, Ir. men of learning, pp 151–9. 44 Knott, Tadhg Dall, 2, pp 295–303. 45 Aithd., nos. 5–8, 10–15, 17– 18, 20–4, 26, 28–33, 36–40. 46 Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, no. 14. 47 Fergus Kelly, ‘An Old Irish tract on court procedure’, Peritia, 5 (1986), 74–106: 85, 93n. See Katharine Simms, ‘Charles Lynegar, the Ó Luinín family and the study of seanchas’ in T.C. Barnard, Dáibhí Ó Cróinín and Katharine Simms (eds), A miracle of learning: studies in manuscripts and Irish learning: essays in honour of William O’Sullivan (Aldershot, 1998), pp 266–83, at p. 268.

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community, whose eye-witness evidence,48 long memory and honesty and integrity qualified him to act as an expert witness in law-suits where the boundaries of individual landholdings, the exact degrees of relationship between a number of claimants to an inheritance, or the details of traditional rents or customs were in dispute. As late as the sixteenth century we find the recorded pleadings over a land dispute in county Clare making reference to the relative merits of the historians (senchada) summoned as expert witnesses for either side of the case.49 Because truthfulness was so important in the witness of a man so old that few others could corroborate his word, the evidence of old poets had been particularly prized. As we have seen, it was part of the requirement of the higher grades of learned poets to master the genealogies of the kings, the tributes due to them, the borders of their territories and the record of their victories in battle. By the time Middle Irish glosses were being added to the Old Irish tract on poetic inspiration Coire Goiriath, the memorizing of tales and sagas was also a duty of every grade of poet.50 However the distinctive feature of the senchaid as the profession developed in the pre-reform church schools was his use of synchronisms, dates and annals. These were all methodological innovations derived from the Latin learning of the church. Synchronisms were parallel tables of events happening at the same time in different countries, used by the fourth-century ecclesiastical historian Eusebius to relate Biblical and Christian history to the records of past secular empires. In Ireland these were adapted to fit Ireland’s mythology and protohistory into a chronological world-history,51 producing an illusion of a firm timeframe for events which either never happened at all, or happened in a period well before any contemporary records. All prose texts of Irish myths and sagas, no matter how many gods, heroes and monsters they contained, were perceived as fitting into this theoretical time-frame and forming part of the legitimate concern of the historian, known as the senchaid (‘antiquary’) or fer coimgne (‘man of synchronisms’(?), or ‘man of comprehensive knowledge’).52 The moveable feasts of the Christian year, in particular controversies over the correct dating of Easter, gave rise to an early expertise in computistics among Irish and European churchmen, with studies in the reconciliation of the solar and the lunar year, of tides and astronomical phenomena. Tables calculating the right date of Easter for 84 or 119 years in advance acquired marginal entries 48 McCone, ‘OIR. senchae, senchaid’, Ériu, 46 (1995), 1–10: 8. 49 CIH, 5, p. 1622. See Simms, ‘Charles Lynegar’, p. 268. 50  Above, pp 359, 361. 51  E.g., Tomás Ó Concheanainn, ‘Lebor Gabála in the Book of Lecan’ in Barnard et al. (eds), A miracle of learning, pp 68–90. See T.M. Charles-Edwards, The Chronicle of Ireland (2 vols, Liverpool, 2006), 1, p. 3 and notes 1–3; John Carey, A new introduction to Lebor Gabála Érenn: the Book of the Taking of Ireland (London, 1993); Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, The Irish Sex Aetates Mundi (Dublin, 1983); H.L.C. Tristram, ‘Sex aetates mundi’: Die Weltzeitalter bei den Angelsachen und den Iren: Untersuchungen und Texte (Heidelberg, 1985). 52 RIA Dictionary, s.v. ‘coimgne’,

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recording the most noteworthy events that distinguished one year from another – visitations of plague, the death of a famous king or abbot and so on, and these short contemporary entries were to provide one source for the growth of the Irish annals,53 which initially blended such scraps of Irish information with the more standard records of foreign chroniclers such as the Venerable Bede or Ammianus Marcellinus. By the ninth century the annals maintained in a number of church centres round Ireland were being increasingly recorded in the Irish language, and the entries were gradually becoming longer and more informative. In the south of Ireland between the tenth and the twelfth centuries the annals themselves became used as a chronological framework around which political sagas could be built up concerning recent kings, the outstanding example of such work being the saga of Brian Bóruma, Cogad Gaedel re Gallaib.54 This text in particular was to provide a template for later medieval historical narratives with a framework of dates, such as the ‘Battle-career of Toirdelbach O’Brien’ (Caithréim Thoirdhealbhaigh) in county Clare, and in Tír Conaill the ‘Genealogical history of Clann Suibne (the Mac Sweeneys)’ by Tadc mac Fithil, and the biography of Áed Rúad II O’Donnell (‘Red Hugh’, d.1602) by Lugaid Ó Cléirig.55 Genealogies too were systematized in the pre-reform church schools, weaving together the pedigrees of individual kings and royal dynasties into an overall scheme of kinship that accounted for the relative closeness or distance of relationship between various population groups and provided a string of remote ancestors that allegedly traced every Irishman back to Adam. Genealogies of the Irish saints were also compiled, linking them to the various ruling dynasties around the country. The constant updating of royal and aristocratic genealogies with the passing generations brought together the political and philosophical concerns of church scholars, and the practical legal function of the senchaidi in relation to disputes over succession and inheritance. Their scrupulous preservation of scraps of outdated pedigrees of once-powerful dynasties who had since died out or lapsed into obscurity provides modern historians with some of their most telling clues to earlier strata in the Irish political scene.56 Because so much of the senchaid’s material was in prose form, manuscripts and literacy played a more essential part in its transmission to later generations p. 130, cols 303–4. 53 Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, ‘Early Irish annals from Easter tables, a case restated’, Peritia, 2 (1983), 74–86. 54 J.H. Todd, Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh: The war of the Gaedhil with the Gaill, of the invasions of Ireland by the Danes and other Norsemen (London, 1867); Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, ‘Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib and the annals: a comparison’, Ériu, 47 (1996), 101–26; Joan Radner, Fragmentary Annals of Ireland (Dublin, 1978), pp xxii–xxvii. 55 Aoife Nic Giollamhaith, ‘Dynastic warfare and historical writing in north Munster, 1276– 1350’, CMCS, 2 (Winter 1981), 73–89; O’Grady, Caithréim; Pól Breatnach, Leabhar Chlainne Suibhne (Dublin, 1920); Walsh, Beatha Aodha Ruaidh; Pádraig Ó Riain, Beatha Aodha Ruaidh: the life of Red Hugh O’Donnell, historical and literary contexts (Dublin, 2002). 56 See Kenneth Nicholls, ‘Genealogy’ in C.N. Buttimer, C. Rynne and H. Guerin (eds), The heritage of Ireland

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than in the case of the poets, and senchaidi were severely affected when the curriculum of church schools was reformed to concentrate on Latin learning. Early thirteenth-century Connacht during the reign of King Cathal Crobderg O’Conor (d.1224) remained a centre for annalistic writing, almost certainly the work of the Ó Máel Chonaire (O’Mulconry) learned poets and historians of the Connacht kings.57 Their activity continued into the fourteenth century with the assistance of the neighbouring Ó Duibgennáin (O’Duignan) family, historians to the MacDermots (Meic Diarmata) of north Roscommon, chief vassals to the O’Conor kings.58 Some work in updating genealogies was also undertaken in the thirteenth century by the Mac Firbisig learned poets and historians of west Sligo.59 However the mid-fourteenth century seems to have witnessed a new enthusiasm for tracking down and transcribing Old and Middle Irish texts of both ‘historical’ (including sagas) and legal material from the manuscript compilations of the earlier church schools, and producing new manuscript anthologies to serve as source books for the secular schools of senchas or to adorn the library of a church leader or secular aristocrat.60 A leading figure of this movement was Seaán Mór Ó Dubagáin (O’Dugan, d.1372), the ollam of history and poetry to O’Kelly (Ó Cellaig) of Uí Maine in east Galway, whose family claimed a close connection with the former monastic seat of historical learning at Clonmacnoise and supplied rectors to the parish of Killosolan (near Castle Blakeney, county Galway) through most of the fifteenth century.61 Associated with these were a whole network of learned families along the Shannon basin who supplied scribes and copied texts from earlier manuscripts for their own anthologies in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.62 As seen above, the Ó Sgingin historians to O’Donnell of Tír Conaill in the fourteenth century and their fifteenth-century successors, the Uí Chléirig poets and historians, came to Ulster from this academically productive area of Connacht. The native Ulster historian, Ádam Ó Cianáin (d.1373), from Fir Manach, travelled as a young man to Uí Maine to study with Seaán Mór Ó Dubagáin himself.63 The merit of the Connacht historians was that they did not confine themselves to transcribing Old and Middle Irish texts from the ancient (Cork, 2000), pp 156–61; Simms, Medieval Gaelic sources, Chap. 2. 57 B.W. O’Dwyer, ‘The Annals of Connacht and Loch Cé, and the monasteries of Boyle and Holy Trinity’, PRIA, 72C (1972), 83–101; Walsh, Ir. men of learning, pp 34–48. 58 Walsh, Ir. men of learning, pp 1–12; Ann. Conn., pp xii–xiv. 59 McKenna, Book of Magauran, no. 24, verse 39; Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 6–7 and notes; Nollaig Ó Muraíle, The celebrated antiquary (Maynooth, 1996), pp 20, 42–4. 60 Tomás Ó Concheanainn, ‘The Book of Ballymote’, Celtica, 14 (1981), 15–25; R.A. Breatnach, ‘The early Book of Uí Mhaine’ in Great books of Ireland [ed. Liam de Paor] (Dublin, 1967), pp 77–89; Kelly, Early Irish law, pp 251–4. 61 James Carney, ‘The Ó Cianáin miscellany’, Ériu, 21 (1969), 122–47; John O’Donovan, ‘The Registry of Clonmacnoise’, Kilkenny and the South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society Journal, 1 (1856/7), 444–60; Annette Kehnel, Clonmacnois – the church and lands of St Ciarán (Münster, 1997), p. 301. 62 Simms, ‘Charles Lynegar’, p. 273; Tomás Ó Concheanainn, ‘The scribe of the Leabhar Breac’, Ériu, 24 (1973), 64–79. 63  Carney, ‘The Ó Cianáin Miscellany’.

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manuscripts of the pre-reform church schools, but also made an effort to understand both the older grammar and vocabulary in which they were written64 and the complicated calendrical notation the early monks had used to establish the dating of their annals, sometimes to the exclusion of AD dates.65 Urard Ó Máel Chonaire (d.1482), who succeeded to the office of ollam of Síl Muiredaig (the Roscommon area) in history and poetics (senchus 7 filidecht) in 1468, was praised as ‘the chief chronicler of the western world, specially learned in the phases of the moon, translator of part of the scriptures from Latin into Irish’.66 It was this kind of specialized training that enabled an Ulster team in the next generation to put together the extraordinarily valuable ‘Annals of Ulster’. The director of the project, Archdeacon Cathal Óc Mac Magnusa (McManus), being a cleric was educated in Latin, though his family, hereditary hospitallers and stewards of the tax-free mensal lands of the Maguuire kings of Fir Manach, were more famed for hospitality than learning.67 However, Cathal Óc employed the services of Rúaidri Ó Luinín, who succeeded Rúaidri Ó Cianáin (O’Keenan, d.1483) as ollam in history to Maguire. The Ó Luinín family (who took the name ‘Lynegar’) were hereditary erenaghs of Arda, with a one-third share in the church lands of Derryvullan parish (county Fermanagh), and generation after generation produced experts in praise-poetry, history, music and Latin studies (dán, senchas, seinm, léiginn) even occasionally in medicine (leigius).68 The second main scribe on the work was Rúaidri Ó Caiside (O’Cassidy, d.1541) who was later to succeed Cathal Óc Mac Magnusa as archdeacon of Clogher. The Ó Caiside family claimed kinship with the poet-historian Gilla Moduda Ó Caiside (fl. 1143/7), fer léiginn of the church school at Devenish.69 However the family had specialized in the study of medicine from the early thirteenth century, although Rúaidri himself is described as learned in philosophy, theology and law also.70 The Annals of Ulster have two great virtues that reflect credit on the ‘science’ of history or senchas as it was studied in late fifteenth-century Ulster. In the first place while Cathal Óc Mac Magnusa’s original manuscript represents a compilation from a number of different historical sources, he seems to have been in possession of, or had access to, a certain valuable old manuscript covering the period from the arrival of St Patrick in Ireland to perhaps the tenth century, but lacking the calendric dating criteria found in other compilations. The team 64 Damian McManus, ‘The language of the Beatha’ in Pádraig Ó Riain (ed.), Beatha Aodha Ruaidh … historical and literary contexts, pp 54–73; Simms, ‘Charles Lynegar’, p. 277. 65 Paul Walsh, Irish leaders and learning, ed. Nollaig Ó Muraíle (Dublin, 2003), pp 477–99; Gearóid Mac Niocaill, The medieval Irish annals (Dublin, 1975), pp 17, 21. 66 Ann. Conn., pp 540–1, 584–5. 67 Simms, ‘Guesting and feasting’, p. 72. 68 Livingstone, The Fermanagh story, pp 41, 431–2; Simms, ‘Charles Lynegar’, p. 275; AU 3, pp (AD1396, 1441, 1446, 1477, 1528, 1529, 1540). Gwynn, Cathal Óg Mac Maghnusa, ed. Ó Muraíle, pp 29–31. 69 Gwynn, Cathal Óg Mac Maghnusa, ed. Ó Muraíle, p. 49; Anon., ‘Geinealaighe Fearmanach’, Anal. Hib., 3 (Sept. 1931), 62–150: 136–7; Kevin Murray, ‘Gilla Mo Dutu Úa Caiside’ in Carey, Herbert and Murray (eds), Cín Chille Cúile, pp 150–62. 70 AU 3, pp 632–3 (AD1541).

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apparently decided to copy this important exemplar letter by letter, thus preserving some rare early spelling forms,71 and to leave a generous space after each year’s entry taken from the early manuscript, which allowed them to add any further historical details from other sources into the space below, using a different scribe and different ink, so that the early text was transmitted unaltered, and could be distinguished from the rest. In addition a gap was left at the top of each entry to allow for an ‘editor’ to go back and insert more elaborate dating criteria, where this could be gleaned from other sources or calculated from a knowledge of the systems originally used by the early church. The work was slightly marred by the loss of one year in the dating sequence for the late fifth century, making all subsequent dates until a correction at AD1013/14 to be labelled one year too early. Nonetheless the Annals of Ulster still provide the most consistent guide to the correct dating of entries in the other annalistic compilations.72 Professor Dan McCarthy has suggested that the scientific training Rúaidri Ó Caiside shared with his medical kinsmen may well explain his unusually early use of Arabic numerals when inserting corrected dates into the blank spaces Ó Luinín had left for this purpose.73 Soon after Cathal Óc’s original compilation, a fair copy of the manuscript was made for Mág Raith (Magrath), the coarb of Termon Magrath, although this copy does not show the same careful distinction between the entries taken from the old source and those drawn from later compilations.74 Yet another copy was to pass into the hands of Friar Míchél Ó Cléirig of Donegal and to form a major source for his still-morecomprehensive seventeenth-century compilation known as the ‘Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland’ or the ‘Annals of the Four Masters’.75 The changing cultural and political conditions of the fifteenth century in Ireland caused the Anglo-Irish Butlers and FitzGeralds to seek legitimation for their growing autonomy not only through the eulogies of bardic poets, but the genealogies and family histories the senchaidi could supply. The two Connacht families of Uí Duibgennáin and Uí Máel Chonaire received invitations to settle on the lands of patrons throughout Ireland and until the mid-sixteenth century they dominated the study of native history as the Ó Dálaig and Ó hUiginn families dominated the poetic profession.76 A high-point was the career of Muirgius Ó Máel Chonaire (d.1543), the compiler and author of the Book of Fenagh, described at his death as ‘ridge-pole of History, bower of Poetry, revealer 71 T.S. Ó Máille, On the language of the Annals of Ulster (Manchester, 1910). 72 CharlesEdwards, The Chronicle of Ireland, p. 51. 73 D.P. McCarthy, ‘The original compilation of the Annals of Ulster’, Studia Celtica, 38 (2004), 69–95: 75–6. 74 Brian Ó Cuív, Catalogue of Irish language manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and Oxford College Libraries (2 vols, Dublin, 2001), 1, pp 153–63. 75 AFM 1, p. lxvi; Paul Walsh, The Four Masters and their work (Dublin, 1944), pp 1–2; Bernadette Cunningham, The Annals of the Four Masters: Irish history, kingship and society in the early seventeenth century (Dublin, 2010). 76 Simms, ‘Bards and barons’, pp 190–2; eadem, ‘The Geraldines and Gaelic culture’ in Crooks and Duffy (eds),

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of all knowledge and wisdom to the disciples, chief institutor of learning in all the arts, a charitable, humane, rich, prosperous man’.77 However as the tide of the Tudor reconquest spread across the east and south of Ireland and into the province of Connacht, the Ó Mael Chonaire and Ó Duibgennáin families lost their dominance, leaving just two outstanding schools of history still strong at the end of the sixteenth century for very different reasons. The Mac Bruaideda school in Clare was protected by the Protestant O’Brien earls of Thomond, whose cooperation with the English government had allowed them to retain much of their lordship intact. The Ó Cléirig school in Tír Conaill was sheltered by the rebellion of their O’Donnell lords, which kept English influence at bay until the end of the Nine Years War (1594–1603), and they were reinforced academically by their association with the Observantine Franciscan house at Donegal. The exile of the poet-historian Cú Coigcríche Ó Cléirig in 1546 caused him to settle for a time in the O’Brien lordship of Thomond where his son Mac Con Ó Cléirig was to marry into the Mac Bruaideda family, a marriage that was ultimately unhappy and ended in a divorce embittered by religious differences.78 The son of this marriage between the two greatest historical dynasties of the later sixteenth century was Lugaid Ó Cléirig, author of a famous biography of Áed Rúad II (‘Red Hugh’) O’Donnell,79 and the erudition of the two rival schools was show-cased in the extraordinary poetic contest known as ‘the Contention of the Bards’.80 This intricate and learned debate was conducted in verse following the death of Hugh or Áed Mór O’Neill, the Great Earl of Tyrone, in Rome in 1616. Tadc mac Dáire Meic Bruaideda had the temerity to launch a campaign claiming that the greatest remaining Gaelic aristocrat still in power was his own patron, Donnchad O’Brien, 4th earl of Thomond, who should therefore be regarded as honorary high-king of Ireland. In spite of some accusations that his ties of kinship hampered Lugaid Ó Cléirig from attacking Tadc as bitterly as he should have done,81 Lugaid was employed by the ancient Áed Óc O’Donnell (great-uncle of the late earl of Tír Conaill) to refute the O’Brien claim and assert the exclusive right of the Northern Uí Néill dynasties of O’Donnell and O’Neill to the future kingship of Ireland. This argument subsequently became less hollow with the outbreak of the 1641 rebellion under the leadership of Feidlim (Phelim) O’Neill, and the return of Eógan Rúad (‘Owen Roe’) O’Neill from his military career on the Continent, when a number of supporters were arguing for a revival of the high-kingship in the persons of either Feidlim or Eógan Rúad.82 The Geraldines and medieval Ireland, pp 264–77. 77 Ann. Conn., pp 730–1. See Katharine Simms, ‘The poetic brehon lawyers of early sixteenth-century Ireland’, Ériu, 57 (2007), 121– 32: 131. 78 Ó Rathile, Dánta grádha, pp 129–31; Walsh, The Ó Cléirigh family, pp 12–16; Lambert McKenna (ed.), Iomarbhágh na bhFileadh: the Contention of the Bards (2 vols, London, 1918) 1, pp 92–3, 102–3, 108–9. 79 Walsh, Beatha Aodha Ruaidh. 80 McKenna, Iomarbhágh. 81 Ibid., 2, pp 204–5. 82 Raymond Gillespie, ‘Destabilizing Ulster’ in Brian

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Friar Míchél Ó Cléirig (originally Tadc an tSléibe, ‘Tadc of the Mountain’, before he took the religious name of Míchél) belonged to a different branch of the Tír Conaill historical dynasty to that of the biographer Lugaid Ó Cléirig. The ‘Four Masters’ team headed by Míchél Ó Cléirig compiled the most comprehensive book of Irish annals yet seen. The influence of early modern European scholarship is seen in the team’s decision to give a list of the sources used for the compilation in a preface, and the work was originally intended for publication by the Franciscan printing press at Louvain.83 The final heirloom of the Ó Cléirig family to subsequent generations of historians was the ‘Book of Genealogies’ compiled by Cú Coigcríche Ó Cléirig (d.c.1664) who may have been a son of Lugaid.84

BRETHEMAIN

(JUDGES)

As in the case of the professions of poetry and history, two families in particular dominated the schools of customary law in Ireland, the Mac Áedacáin (Keegan, MacEgan) family based in Connacht and the midlands, and the Meic Flannchada (Clancy) of north Munster.85 In Ulster from the fourteenth century onwards we have notices in the annals of Ó Breisléin (O’Breslin) experts in Brehon law.86 Like the Ó Luinín historians, the Ó Breisléin family were hereditary erenaghs of one-third of the church lands in the parish of Derryvullan (county Fermanagh). The last Ó Breisléin brethem or judge to the Maguire lords of Fir Manach was introduced to the attorney-general Sir John Davies in 1607. Sir John interrogated him as to the whereabouts of a written record of Maguire’s dues and tributes from the freeholders of Fir Manach. Ó Breisléin, who is described by Davies as both ‘a chronicler [senchaid], and principal brehon’, was extremely old and decrepit. Like any good lawyer he was reluctant to reveal his patrons’ records to a stranger, and at first made answer that he had such a roll in his keeping before the war, but that in the late rebellion it was burned among other of his papers and books by certain English soldiers. We were told by some that were present that this was not true; for they affirmed that they had seen the roll in his hands since the war. Thereupon my Lord the Chancellor … did minister an oath to him … The poor old man, fetching a deep sigh, confessed that he knew where the roll was, but that it was dearer to him than his life, and therefore Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641: aspects of the rising (Belfast, 1993), pp 107–22, at p. 115; P.J. Corish, ‘Ormond, Rinuccini and the Confederates, 1645–9’ in NHI 3, pp 317–35, at p. 328. 83 See Cunningham, The Annals of the Four Masters, Chaps. 1–5. 84 Pender, ‘The O’Clery Book of Genealogies’. 85 Kelly, Early Irish law, pp 252–6 (and map). 86 AFM 3, pp 524– 5 (AD1322); AU 3, pp 146–7, 160–1, 264–5, 394–5, 506–9 (AD1440, 1447, 1478, 1495, 1513).

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages he would never deliver it out of his hands unless my Lord Chancellor would take the like oath that the roll should be restored to him again. My Lord Chancellor, smiling, gave him his word … And thereupon the old brehon drew the roll out of his bosom, where he did continually bear it about him. It was not very large, but it was written on both sides in a fair Irish character; howbeit, some part of the writing was worn and defaced with time and ill-keeping.87

The roll did indeed contain a record of Maguire’s tributes. The English administrators made a translation of it which Davies promptly lost, and unfortunately the original roll is also no longer extant. Records of a king’s tributes are the business of the senchaid as much as the brethem and as we have seen Ó Breisléin was both. Conversely the only two Brehon law manuscripts with Ulster connections are associated with senchaide – British Library MS Nero A 7 was written in 1571 by Matha Ó Luinín, whose family were historians and erenaghs in the same Derryvullan parish as the Uí Breisléin.88 This manuscript contains the important eighth-century Munster text Bretha Nemed Toísech.89 National Library of Ireland MS G 3, the second section of a manuscript written mostly by the fourteenth-century historian Ádam Ó Cianáin, whose kinsmen were senchaide and erenaghs in Cleenish parish (county Fermanagh),90 contains the classic Old Irish law tracts Uraicecht Becc (fragmentary copy) and Cóic Conara Fugill, inserted by another unnamed scribe.91 Another legal family based in ‘Tweskard’ or ‘the Route’ in north Antrim (Tuaiscert Ulad) had the name Mac Birrthagra (MacBerkery). As with the Ó hUid poets from south-west Antrim, we have no texts or manuscripts ascribed to this family in the medieval period, and just one notice concerning them in 1529 from the Annals of Loch Cé: Domnall, son of Eoin, son of Domnall Mac Birrthagra, adbar ollaman of the North of Ulad in bérla fenechais, mortuus est, et sepultus est in CarraigFerguis [died and was buried in Carrickfergus]. James, son of Ruaidri Mac Birrthagra, a macfuirmig of his own art, mortuus est [died].92 However this one notice tells us a great deal. The actual surname Mac Birrthagra (which could be rendered ‘son of short pleading’)93 would indicate that as early as the period of surname formation in the tenth to twelfth centuries the family 87 Morley, Ire. under Eliz. & Jas I, pp 368–9. 88 Kelly, Early Irish law, p. 260; Simms, ‘Charles Lynegar’, pp 275–6. 89  Liam Breatnach, ‘Canon law and secular law in early Ireland: the significance of Bretha Nemed ’, Peritia, 3 (1984), 439–59. 90 AU 3, pp 44–5, 282–3, 572–3 (AD1400, 1483, 1528). 91 Breatnach, Companion, p. 315; Neasa Ní Shéaghdha, Catalogue of Irish manuscripts in the National Library of Ireland, I (Dublin, 1961), p. 26 (NLI MS G 3, ff. 26r–45v). 92 ALC 2, pp 268–9 (my additions in square brackets). A shorter version of this entry is found in Ann. Conn., pp 672–3 (AD1529). 93 Kelly, Early Irish law,

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may have descended from a professional advocate. The expression adbar ollaman, ‘intended professor’ or ‘material of a master scholar’, implies the Mac Birrthagra family as a whole had a hereditary claim on a post as ollam or ‘master’ of customary jurisprudence, and almost certainly ran a law school, and that successive generations were trained up to succeed to this financially rewarding position, just as the phrase adbar ríg, ‘material of a king’, marked out a member of a royal dynasty who was eligible to succeed to the kingship.94 Bérla fénechais or the ‘language of Irish customary law’ implies an ability to negotiate the Old Irish language and esoteric terminology of the ancient texts of the law as drawn up in the early church schools, rather than relying on a merely oral education in Irish customs. Macfuirmid was the second grade above absolute beginner in a bardic school of poetry, but the expression ‘in his own art’ indicates that James (or Sémus) had reached this rank within the law school, and also suggests that his education in this school may have included a study of poetry, as was the practice in schools run by the two famous Brehon law dynasties of Mac Flannchada and Mac Áedacáin.95 It seems the Mac Birrthagra law school may have been better known in its day than the west-Ulster bias of the annalistic record might suggest. This impression is reinforced by the statement of the seventeenth-century historian Geoffrey Keating that Uí Breisléin and Meic Birrthagra were the judges in customary law for all Ulster.96 In the registers of the primates of Armagh, we find two members of the Mac Birrthagra family as rebellious canons of Armagh cathedral in 1369, one of whom, ‘Iohannes’,97 had served as the archbishop’s seneschal in the city of Armagh, its tenements and surrounding churches, and had also been appointed prebendary of Desertlyn (south-east county Derry) by Archbishop Sweteman in 1365, and later served as Official of the ruri-decanal court of Tullahogue, indicating that he held a qualification in canon law.98 On 7 August 1455 a certain ‘Odo’ or Áed Mac Birrthagra with his brothers and followers was exempted from the general interdict Archbishop Mey had imposed on the diocese of ‘Armagh among the Irish’ because of Mac Birrthagra’s constant faithfulness and goodwill shown to the utmost of his power toward the archbishop and the church’s business, and because he had bound himself to the archbishop by an oath.99 This might suggest that ‘Odo’ also served as an administrator under the archbishop, but in this case there is no evidence for clerical orders or a qualification in canon law. The possibility of combining the study of canon law and Irish customary law implied in the case of ‘Iohannes’ Mac Birrthagra had a long history in the prep. 260 note 107. 94 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 87–8. 95 Simms, ‘The poetic brehon lawyers of early sixteenth-century Ireland’. 96 Kelly, Early Irish law, p. 260; Foras Feasa, 3, pp 12–13. 97 In view of the family fore-names in the annal entry for 1529, ‘Iohannes’ should probably be translated as ‘Eoin’ rather than ‘Seaán’. 98 Smith, Reg. Sweteman, nos. 83, 109, 150, 209. 99 Quigley & Roberts, Reg. Mey, no. 345. On the occasion for the interdict see

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reform church schools,100 and could also result in a hereditary churchman taking up the study of Irish customary law. Henry O’Neill’s judge in 1455 was Canon Art Mac Cathmail (MacCawell), a member of the most successful erenagh family in the ecclesiastical province of Armagh, whose primary qualification may have been in canon law, since he is found acting in church cases also.101 In 1460, Bernard or Brian Mág Uinsennáin, claiming clerical status, was accused of forging Henry O’Neill’s name and seal on a document purporting to be a letter from the chieftain to Archbishop Bole, suggesting he may have had some official capacity in O’Neill’s service. Forty-two years later, a namesake Bernard Mág Uinsennáin was Official Principal or canon law judge of Clogher diocese in 1502.102 In 1507, the annals note the death of Feidlim Mág Uinsennáin who fulfilled the dual role of judge to Áed O’Donnell, lord of Tír Conaill, and Official Principal in the consistory or diocesan court of Raphoe.103

LEGA

( P H YS I C I A N S )

The evidence both from annal entries and extant manuscripts and scribal names suggests that the three main medical families who cared for the health of the Ulster chieftains enjoyed a higher profile within their own profession than the Ulster lawyers. The best-recorded family of physicians in the annals was the Ó Caiside (O’Cassidy) family of the Cúil (barony of Coole, county Fermanagh). This in itself is not a guarantee of a nation-wide reputation, since the Annals of Ulster, which are the main source of information about them, were not only compiled within a few miles of their family estate in the late fifteeenth century, but one of the scribes working on the chronicle was, as we have seen, an Ó Caiside cleric with some knowledge of medicine. The Ulster annals record two Ó Caiside ollamain of medicine for Fir Manach in the early fourteenth century, and then after an interval of some eighty years, the record begins again for the fifteenth and early sixteenth century,104 incidentally showing that the physicians were so bound to the chieftains they served that, when the main Maguire dynasty split into two ruling branches for east and west Fir Manach in the later fifteenth century, the Uí Chaiside split also into a main branch still located in the barony of Coole, and a western branch who were physicians to Clann Philip Maguire.105 An interesting point about these notices of the Fermanagh physicians is that not one of them is given a title suggesting they had obtained a university degree Simms, ‘The concordat’, pp 71–2. 100  Breatnach, ‘Canon law and secular law’. 101 Simms, ‘The concordat’, pp 72–3. 102 Sughi, Reg. Octaviani, 2, nos. 31, 412. 103 AU 3, pp 482–5; AFM 5, pp 1290–1 (AD1507). See Kelly, Early Irish law, p. 260. 104 AFM 3, pp 528–9, 554–5; 4, pp 968–9, 994–5 (AD1322, 1335, 1450, 1455); AU 3, pp 108–9, 170–1, 346–7, 386–7, 458–9, 466–7, 534–5, 632–3 (AD1429, 1450, 1490, 1495, 1502, 1504, 1520, 1540). 105 Brendan Smith, ‘Medicine in medieval Ireland’, Retrospect: Journal of the Irish

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abroad, such as Batchelor, Master or Doctor, although other hereditary medical men in Ireland are occasionally so styled.106 However a very fine early sixteenthcentury medical manuscript transcribed by An Gilla Glas Ó Caiside at various places in Limerick and Tipperary is a beautifully written and illuminated107 anthology of Irish translations of extracts from various standard Latin medical texts that were current in the medical schools of English and Continental universities such as Bernard of Gordon, Lilium Medicine, Isaac Judaeus, Diete Particularis, Bertraucius, Lucidarius vel Almagest. An Gilla Glas makes careful notes at intervals of who owned the manuscript exemplar from which he copied a particular text, and who originally translated a work from Latin into Irish. The fact that there are some short passages in untranslated Latin here and there in the manuscript suggests he had some knowledge of Latin himself and may have been responsible for some of the anonymous translations. Two translators he names are Diarmaid Ó Siridéin (O’Sheridan) from a hereditary clerical family in Breifne, or the diocese of Kilmore, who translated a work of Bernard of Gordon, and Cormac Ó Duinnshléibe (O’Donleavy), a ‘Batchelor’ from the Donegal medical family of that name, who translated Lucidarius.108 This Cormac was not the only member of the Ó Duinnshléibe family of Tír Conaill to acquire a university education. In 1527, the death is noted of ‘The Doctor’ Donnchad son of Eógan Ulltach Ó Duinnshléibe, ‘eminent in physic and very many other sciences (saoi fhisici 7 andsna healadhnaibh eile d’urmór)’, ‘a man of great affluence and wealth, who kept a house of general hospitality’.109 Interestingly it appears this man’s son (Eógan Ulltach son of the Doctor Donnchad) did not have a formal university degree like his father and the annals when noting his death in 1586 are slightly defensive about this: ‘this Eógan was a doctor in regard of learning, for he excelled the medical doctors of Ireland in the time in which he lived’.110 The extent and the high quality of the medical textbooks that were translated from Latin into Irish in the high Middle Ages would seem to justify this implied claim that a medical student who studied at home in Ireland, using such texts, could be as learned as a university graduate, and as wellequipped to cure his patients. Although medieval medical treatises both in Ireland and abroad included some strange ideas about the influence of the stars and a person’s birth-date on his or her health, they gave valuable information on herbal cures, preventative medicine and diets, symptoms and diagnosis.111 The men of History Students Association (1987), 13–18: 17. 106  On medieval Irish physicians with university educations see Mairéad Dunlevy, ‘The medical families of medieval Ireland’ in William Doolin and Oliver Fitzgerald (eds), What’s past is prologue: a retrospect of Irish medicine (Dublin, 1952), pp 15–22; AFM 5, pp 1870–1; 6, pp 2140–1 (AD1588, 1599). 107 See Ó Cuív, Catalogue of Irish language manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, 1, frontispiece, and no. 46. 108 Ó Cuív, Catalogue of Irish language manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, 1, pp 293, 295. 109 AFM 5, pp 1388–9; AU 3, pp 564–7 (AD1527). 110 AFM 5, pp 1856–7 (AD1586). 111 See, for example, Winifred Wulff (ed.), Rosa Anglica (London, 1929); idem (ed.), ‘On the qualities, maners and kunnynge of a surgean etc’, ZCP, 18 (1930), 249–86;

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the Ó Duinnshléibe or Mac Duinnshléibe medical family of Tír Conaill often used the nickname ‘Ultach’ or Mac an Ultaig (MacNulty), ‘Ulsterman’ or ‘son of the Ulsterman’ instead of their surname, and claimed to be descended from the Mac Duinnshléibe kings of Ulaid, or east Ulster.112 This is certainly possible, as the Mac Duinnshléibe kings are no longer heard of in their homeland in county Down after the thirteenth century, and we have seen that the Ó Cléirig historians also claimed to be descended from dispossessed kings.113 In neither case can the claim be established beyond all doubt. The first Mac an Ultaig to be recorded in the annals was a follower of Domnall Óc Ó Domnaill, king of Tír Conaill, who died in the Battle of Desertcreat in 1281, and this occurred less than ten years after the last recorded king of Ulaid, Tadc Mac Duinnshléibe, signed a letter to the English government in 1273, styling himself ‘rex Hibernicorum Ultonie.114 The third prominent medical family to be active in medieval Ulster were the Uí Shiadail (Shiels, O’Shiels). They seem to have originated in the present county Offaly, where they were associated with Ballyshiel and the early Christian church site of Lynally or Lann Ella.115 They spread widely throughout Ireland, however. A Cormac Ó Siadail is recorded as a canon of Derry in 1485, and in 1531 the annals record the death of an Ó Siadail as ollam in medicine for the peninsula of Inishowen.116 A number of the family worked as scribes for the O’Doherty chief of Inishowen in the sixteenth century.117 Like scribes from other medical families,118 Ó Siadail scribes are found working on a number of nonmedical manuscripts, such as British Library Egerton MS 1781, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Miscellany 615, and Rawlinson B 513.119

LUCHT CIÚIL

(MUSICIANS)

Musicians in early Irish society were firmly divided by the Old Irish law tracts into those that were nemed, ‘privileged’ or ‘noble’, and those that were not. According to the Uraicecht Becc only harpists and timpanists belonged to a social level comparable to doctors and lawyers. The ollam of harp music, but perhaps not his lesser kinsmen or pupils, enjoyed equal status with a leading free Séamus Ó Ceithearnaigh [James Carney] (ed.), Regimen na Sláinte (3 vols, Baile Áthda Cliath, 1942–4). 112 Fearghus Mac Giolla Easpaig/Fergus Gillespie, ‘Gaelic families of county Donegal’ in Donegal Hist. & Soc., pp 759–838, at pp 770–2. 113 See above, p. 379. 114 See above, p. 103. 115 O’Grady & Flower, Cat. Ir. MSS, 2, pp 542–3; Ó Cuív, Catalogue of Irish language manuscripts in the Bodleian, 1, pp 256–7. 116 Brian Bonner, ‘Ó Siail the healer’, Donegal Annual, 47 (1995), 5–8. 117 Anne O’Sullivan and Máire Herbert, ‘The provenance of Laud Misc. 615’, Celtica, 10 (1973), 174–92: 175–6; Darren Mac Eiteagáin, ‘The Renaissance and the late medieval lordship of Tír Chonaill’ in Donegal Hist. & Soc., pp 203– 28, at pp 210, 225 note 20. 118 Walsh, Ir. men of learning, p. 208. 119 Ó Cuív, Catalogue of Irish language manuscripts in the Bodleian, 1, pp 88–101, 255–60; O’Grady & Flower,

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landowner (bó-aire tuíse), the same grade as doctors and judges, even where his qualification in music was not combined with another art such as history, or with noble birth.120 As with the early distinction between bards and filid, the point was apparently that both the harp and the tympanum (a stringed instrument somewhat resembling a zither, plucked with quills or with the fingers) were used by the church and the learned classes to accompany psalms, chants and secular eulogies. We are told that when the church on the island of Inis Mór on Lough Gill (county Sligo) was burnt in 1416 the scriptorium of the senchaid Ó Cuirnín was destroyed in the same fire. On this occasion Ó Cuirnín lost not only a prized family manuscript, the ‘Short Book of the Uí Chuirnín’ (Lebar Gerr Muintire Curnin) but his great harp (cláirsech) and his tympanum (timpán) also.121 The twelfth-century chronicler of the Cambro-Norman invasion, Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis), while critical of so many other aspects of Irish culture was enthusiastic about the quality of music in this country. He wrote: It is only in the case of musical instruments that I find any commendable diligence in the people. They seem to me to be incomparably more skilled in these than any other people that I have seen. The movement is … quick and lively, while at the same time the melody is sweet and pleasant. It is remarkable how in spite of the great speed of the fingers, the musical proportion is maintained. The melody is kept perfect and full with unimpaired art through everything – through quivering measures and the involved use of several instruments – with a rapidity that charms, a rhythmic pattern that is varied, and a concord achieved through elements discordant. They harmonize at intervals of the octave and the fifth, but they always begin with B flat and with B flat end, so that everything may be rounded with the sweetness of charming sonority. They glide so subtly from one mode to another, and the grace notes so freely sport with such abandon and bewitching charm around the steady tone of the heavier sound, that the perfection of their art seems to lie in concealing it … One should note that both Scotland and Wales … try to imitate Ireland in music and strive in emulation. Ireland uses and delights in two instruments only, the harp namely, and the timpanum.122 In fact the Irish did use other forms of music-making – the commentary to Uraicecht Becc mentions pipes and mouth music, but those who played instruments other than the harp and tympanum were described as minstrels (airfitig) and associated with entertainers at fairs.123 Giraldus’s technical description of Irish music, mentioning the use of B flat and the intervals of Cat. Ir. MSS, 2, pp 526–45. 120 Anc. Laws Ire., 5, pp 90–1, 106–7; CIH, 5, p. 1616: 31–6; 6, p. 2328: 21–7, p. 2333: 23–9. 121 Ann. Conn., pp 430–1 (AD1416). 122 O’Meara, Gerald of Wales, pp 103–4. 123 Angela Gleason, ‘Music’ in Seán Duffy (ed.), Medieval Ireland: an

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harmony, shows that he was familiar with the academic theory of music as it was studied in the twelfth century, and he apparently considered Irish harpists to be equally enlightened. It is one of the mysteries of Irish manuscript survival that we have no extant written music from medieval Ireland before the sixteenth century,124 apart from the books of church music belonging to the Anglo-Irish cathedrals.125 The gentlemanly status of the harper is confirmed by the etiquette at feasts which required guests to be silent while the harper played, rather than continuing to converse among themselves to a pleasing background of music from the minstrels’ gallery, as appears to have been the custom in other parts of Europe. The sixteenth-century Dublin author, Richard Stanyhurst, wrote somewhat indignantly: ‘when the harper twangeth or singeth a song, all the company must be whist, or else he chafeth like a cutpurse, by reason his harmony is not had in better price’.126 He repeated this observation in a more extended discussion of Irish music in 1584, with the additional information that many harpers were blind, and that they ‘rage and rave like someone half mad’ not only if their audience is inattentive, but if they fail to receive fulsome praise for their performance.127 This insistence on respectful treatment from the audience is quite understandable when we look at the identities of some master musicians of Ulster noted in the medieval annals. Uilliam Óc mac Uilliam Mic Gilla Rúaid (MacIlroy), described as an eminent player of stringed instruments (saí fhir théd) who died in 1497, belonged to the family of a minor chieftain occupying the borderlands between Fir Manach and Breifne. Domnall Mac Gilla Rúaid, the head of the family, had married Margaret (d.1493), daughter of Tomás Óc Maguire, king of Fir Manach.128 The Ó Coinnecán (Cunningham) family who produced ‘The Timpanist’ Ó Coinnecán (d.1177), chief ollam of the north of Ireland, came from a family of hereditary clerics, probably including Fionn Ua Conaingen (d.1126), erenagh of Derry for a time.129 The Ó Corcráin family were clerics in Fir Manach with a long history going back at least as far as Cathalán Ó Corcráin (d.1001), abbot of Devenish, and including a fourteenth-century bishop of Clogher and his son, the imperial notary Tomás Ó Corcráin (d.1385). Two of this surname are described as pre-eminent harpists in the fifteenth century,130 encyclopedia (New York and Abingdon, 2005), pp 346–8; Anc. Laws Ire., 5, pp 108–9; CIH, 6, p. 2281: 30 – p. 2282: 4. 124 Gerard Murphy, ‘Callen o custure me’, Éigse, 1:2 (1939), 125– 9; idem, ‘A folksong traceable to Elizabethan times’, Éigse, 7:2 (1953), 117–20. 125 Raymond Refaussé, ‘The Christ Church manuscripts in context’ in Raymond Gillespie and Raymond Refaussé (eds), The medieval manuscripts of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (Dublin, 2006), pp 13–32, at pp 26–31. 126 Miller & Power, Holinshed’s Ir. Chron., p. 113. 127 John Barry and Hiram Morgan (eds), Great deeds in Ireland: Richard Stanihurst’s De rebus in Hibernia gestis (Cork, 2013), pp 120–1. He adds an interesting technical description of the bagpipes, or warpipes, calling them the ‘whetstone of courage in battle’ (ibid.). 128 AU 3, pp 366–7, 426–7 (AD1493, 1497). 129 AFM 2, pp 1022–3 (AD1126), ALC 1, pp 154–7; 2, pp 436–7 (AD1177, 1581). 130 AFM 2, pp 744–5 (AD1001); AU 2, pp 538–9 note 10; 3, pp 14–17,

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while in the seventeenth century Brian Ó Corcráin was a praise-poet to the Maguire family and the translator of a prose romance ‘Eachtra Mhacaoimh an Iolair’ into Irish.131 The ubiquitous clerical connections of the highest class of musician in Ulster followed a pattern found elsewhere in Ireland. Bran Ó Braín (d.1364), a master timpanist (saí timpánaig), shared his surname with a succession of tenth- to thirteenth-century coarbs of Roscommon and Clonmacnois, including the Tigernach Ó Braín who is celebrated as a contributor to the ‘Annals of Tigernach’.132 The blind Máel Rúanaid Mac Cerbaill (d.1328/9), ‘the most choice timpanist of Ireland and of Scotland and of the whole world’, shared his surname not only with other eminent musicians, but with four archbishops of Cashel called Mac Cerbaill in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.133 Máel Rúanaid Mac Cerbaill was killed in the court of John de Bermingham, earl of Louth, a casualty of the ‘Braganstown Massacre’, and we are told that with the great musician died ‘about twenty other timpanists, his students’.134 This suggests a great lord’s court might be entertained not only by solo musicians but by a stringed ensemble playing together, as is also implied by Giraldus Cambrensis’ reference quoted above to the ‘involved use of several instruments’. In a fictional tale from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century known as ‘The story of the Kern in the Narrow Stripes or, as some would have it, of O’Donnell’s Kern’ (Echtra in chetharnaig chaoilriabaig nó chetharnaig úi Dhomnaill do réir dhruinge), we are told that the guests at a feast given by Áed Dub Ó Domnaill (d.1537) at his castle in Ballyshannon were entertained by twenty-two musicians. However when their musical skills were challenged by a mysterious trickster, later identified in one version of the text as the sea-god Manannán in disguise, they apparently responded with solos and duets rather than playing as a group. In the same tale we are told Mac Murchada Cáemánach, who even at this late date made use of the title ‘king of Leinster’, had sixteen harpers entertaining his guests, and here it seems more clearly implied that they were playing as an ensemble. Each time the trickster challenged the musicians at a feast, in Ballyshannon, in Leinster and in county Limerick at the mansion of Lord John Fitzgerald, the son of the earl of Desmond, he was permitted to take a harp himself to demonstrate his superior skill in playing.135 This could 130–1, 398–400 (AD1369, 1385, 1433, 1496). 131  J.F. Nagy, A new introduction to two Arthurian romances (London, 1998), p. 3; Paul Walsh, ‘Dánta Bhriain Uí Chorcráin’, Irisleabhar Mhuighe Nuadhad (1929), 35–50. 132 AFM 2, pp 700–1, 720–1, 930–1, 1174–5; 3, pp 76–7, 262–3, 270–1 (AD974, 987, 1088, 1170, 1187, 1232, 1234); AU 2, pp 516–17 (AD1364). 133 NHI 9, p. 290; Ann. Conn., pp 112–13, 264–5, 314–15 (AD1255, 1328, 1357); AU 2, pp 444–5, 504–5 (AD1328, 1357); AFM 4, pp 674–5 (AD1379). 134 Williams, The Annals of Ireland by Friar John Clyn, pp 194–5. See J.F. Lydon, ‘The Braganstown massacre, 1329’, Journal of the County Louth Historical and Archaeological Society, 19 (1977), 5–16. 135 O’Grady, Silva Gadelica, 1, pp 276–7, 280, 287–8; 2, pp 312–13, 315, 322–3. In O’Grady’s text the O’Donnell in question is Áed Dub, d.1537, but in another recension, edited by Éinrí

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have been a harp taken from one of the musicians he was deriding, but could also have belonged to the lords themselves. The poem A chláirsioch Chnuic Uí Chosgair that is somewhat doubtfully attributed to the fourteenth-century ollam Gofraid Finn Ó Dálaig (d.1387), celebrates the harp belonging to the house of  Diarmait Mageoghegan (Mág Eochacáin) at Knockycosker, barony of Moycashel, county Westmeath, and tells us that many of the great heroes of mythology were said to own famous harps, which were individually named, in the same way as their prize horses or hunting-dogs.136 A present of the lord’s own harp was one of the most signal honours that could be bestowed on a masterpoet. Two poems to O’Brien lords at widely differing periods thank them warmly for such an important favour,137 providing a further demonstration that playing the harp was an honourable skill for both nobles and members of the learned classes, and was not confined to professional musicians. The harp displayed in Trinity College Library in Dublin, popularly known as ‘Brian Boru’s Harp’, has been claimed as a fifteenth-century harp once belonging to an O’Neill chieftain.138

CEIRD

(CRAFTSMEN)

In Ancient Rome the ‘liberal arts’, suitable for free men, such as poetry, music and mathematics, were distinguished from ‘servile arts’ requiring manual labour, though the medieval definition of the ‘seven liberal arts’ that formed the preliminary stage of university education was a post-classical development.139 In early medieval Ireland the distinction between manual crafts and intellectual learning was not so marked. Smiths, masons, ornamental metal-workers and manuscript illuminators, like poets and judges, could claim free, or in some cases noble, status in society even if they were not landowners, on the basis of their craft. The franchise extended as far as the ranks of wood-turners, tanners and fishermen, who enjoyed the same limited free status as a fer midboth, the young son of a landowning family, who had not yet acquired land himself. Below this level came lesser musicians, singers, pipers, drummers, jockeys, charioteers, steersmen, jugglers and clowns, who could only access the law courts in right of Ó Muirgheasa, Ceithearnach Ui Dhomhnaill (Dublin, 1912), the O’Donnell is Áed Rúad d.1505, son of Niall Garb, d.1439. 136 Bergin, IBP, no. 15. 137 ‘Tabhraidh chugam cruit mo ríogh’, Paul Walsh, Gleanings from Irish manuscripts (2nd ed., Dublin, 1933), pp 113–15; T.O. Clancy, The triumph tree: Scotland’s earliest poetry, 550–1350 (Edinburgh, 1998), pp 256– 7; ‘Ceolchar sin a chruit mo ríogh’, Walsh, Gleanings, pp 111–13. 138 Raghnall Ó Floinn, ‘Wooden harp – the “Brian Boru” Harp’ in Michael Ryan (ed.), Treasures of Ireland: Irish art 3000BC–1500AD (Dublin, 1983), Catalogue no. 87, pp 72, 180, 193; Brian Manners, ‘The Trinity College Harp’ in Joseph Mannion and Katharine Simms (eds), Politics, kinship and culture in Gaelic Ireland, c.1100–c.1690 (Dublin, 2018), pp 99–109. 139 Leslie Brubaker, ‘Arts, seven liberal’ in Joseph Strayer (ed.), Dictionary of the Middle Ages (New York, 1982), p. 580.

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their free employers, as they did not have independent legal status.140 It is a symptom of the high status of sculptors and metal-workers that a number of the high crosses and shrines in pre-Norman Ireland carry the names of their creators, at a period when signed works of art were very much the exception elsewhere in Europe.141 Particularly interesting is the inscription on the shrine of the Cathach of St Columba (see above, Fig. 23), dating to the late eleventh century, which names the maker as Sitric mac Meic Áeda. Given that the clerical patron of the shrine was the abbot of Kells, there is a strong probability that the smith was identical with, or related to, a certain ‘mac Áeda Ceird’ who owned a house-site in the monastic settlement of Kells, the subject of an Irish ‘charter’ dating c.1100, found inserted in a blank space in the gospel book of Kells.142 A sign of continuing high status for some craftsmen in the later Middle Ages is the death-notice in the Annals of Ulster under the year 1479 for Matha O’Mulroney (hUa Mailruanaigh), ollam of metal-working to the lord of Fermanagh, Tomás Óc Maguire, a master goldsmith (sai óircerda), who kept a house of hospitality for the general public, just as many an ollam of poetry or history might do.143 This lone written record of a craftsman for this period owes something to the fact that the Annals of Ulster were being compiled in Fermanagh at the time, but stonemasons with the Ulster surnames of Ó Cuinn and Ó Brolcháin are found working on tomb sculptures in the abbey of Iona during the fifteenth century.144 The only substantial example of figure sculpture surviving in Ulster itself is the O’Cahan tomb in Dungiven, ringed with a bodyguard of galloglass (see Fig. 13 above), reminiscent both of Scottish tombs and the fifteenth-century base of Felim O’Conor’s tomb in Roscommon. Two trends in the visual art of later medieval Ulster reflect more general cultural developments of the time. The manuscript illumination in Ádam Ó Cianáin’s fourteenth-century historical miscellany NLI G 2–3, the repoussé leatherwork on the satchel which enclosed the Book of Armagh, and the wooden carving on the Trinity College harp, all echo the interlace style of the preNorman period,145 a ‘backward look’ paralleling political attempts to revive a provincial kingship of Ulster, symbolically signalled by the heroic barefoot style of dress at O’Neill’s court, and Niall Óc’s feast held for the poets of Ireland on 140 Eoin MacNeill, ‘Ancient Irish law: the law of status or franchise’, PRIA, 36C (1923), 265– 316: 279–80, and see above, pp 396–7, below, p. 408. 141 P.E. Micheli, ‘The inscriptions on pre-Norman Irish reliquaries’, PRIA, 96C (1996), 1–48; Raghnall Ó Floinn, Irish shrines and reliquaries of the Middle Ages (Dublin, 1994), pp 38–40. 142 John O’Donovan, ‘The Irish charters in the Book of Kells’ in John O’Donovan (ed.), Miscellany of the Irish Archaeological Society (Dublin, 1846), pp 140–1; Gearóid Mac Niocaill (ed.), Notitiae as Leabhar Cheanannais, 1033–1161 (Cló Morainn, 1961), p. 14, notes 22–3. 143  Below, p. 483. 144  Raghnall Ó Floinn, ‘The Norman Conquest and the later Middle Ages, 1169AD– ca.1500AD’ in Ryan (ed.), Treasures of Ireland, pp 70–3, at p. 72. 145 Ó Floinn, ‘The Norman Conquest and the later Middle Ages’, p. 72, where the author argues for Scottish influence on this conservative style of decoration.

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Fig. 27 Fifteenth-century high cross on Devenish Island, county Fermanagh. Roger Stalley collection © TRIARC Trinity Irish Art Research Centre.

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the site of the ancient Emain Macha (Navan Ring, Armagh) as noted above in Chapter 4 (p. 136). On the other hand, the blend of ‘Celtic’ and ‘Continental’ styles which Henry and Micheli have noted in the manuscript decoration of the fragmentary ‘Book of the White Earl’ (of Ormond)146 finds expression in the fifteenth-century high cross on Devenish Island (see Fig. 27), the manuscript decoration on Manus O’Donnell’s Life of Colmcille, and the Dunvegan Cup, originally made in 1493 for Katherine O’Neill, wife of Seaán Maguire, lord of Fermanagh (see Fig. 28). The openness to foreign sources of artistic influence shown in these cases may reflect not only the closer political ties in the fifteenth century between Ulster chiefs and the Anglo-Irish administration under the White Earl of Ormond and the Great Earl of Kildare, conditions fostering the ‘Anglicization’ of Gaelic chiefs as much as the ‘Gaelicization’ of barons,147 but also closer ties with the Continent brought about by the Observantine Reform, Fig. 28 Dunvegan Cup, from whose influence is demonstrated by the D. Wilson. The archaeology and prehistorical Annals of Scotland many new friaries founded across Ulster (Edinburgh, 1851), plate vi, p. 652. in this period, and an influx from Scotland, not merely of galloglass troops, but settlers to inhabit the newly-established MacDonald lordship in the Glens of Antrim. Like the poets and lawyers, Ulster craftsmen could change with the times.

146 Françoise Henry and Geneviève Marsh-Micheli, ‘Manuscripts and illuminations, 1169– 1603’ in NHI 2, pp 780–815, at pp 798–802. 147 See Freya Verstraten Veach, ‘Anglicization in medieval Ireland: was there a Gaelic Irish “middle nation”?’ in Seán Duffy and Susan Foran (eds), The English isles (Dublin, 2013), pp 118–38.

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CHAPTER

11

Warriors and warfare The multitude of small semi-independent jurisdictions into which Ulster and Gaelic Ireland in general was divided led to frequent border warfare. Consequently the chief virtue asked of aristocratic males was gaisced, ‘gallantry’, ‘valour’ or ‘warlike skills’. This term originated as a compound of two words ga + scíath, ‘spear and shield’, the equipment of a warrior, and then came to refer to the solemn occasion on which a young warrior first receives this equipment or ‘takes arms’ (gaibid gaisced) at the hands of his lord or a senior kinsman.1

WA R R I O R - B A N D S

( F Í A NA )

I N P R E H I S T O R I C A N D E A R LY

M E D I E VA L I R E L A N D

The early Irish inherited from their Indo-European and Celtic ancestors the institution of the warrior-band, or Männerbund. From prehistoric times to the ninth century, especially in the case of aristocratic youths, or ‘sons of kings’ (maicc ríg), the end of a youth’s fosterage period, at fourteen or seventeen years, might be followed by a period as a member of a warrior-band or fían, acquiring training and practice in military skills.2 Such warrior-bands lived by hunting in the hills and woods outside the lands of the settled community, and in pagan times were dedicated to a cult of rapine and slaughter, signified by a ‘devilish sign’ worn on the head, indicating the wearer had pledged himself to kill someone.3 It is possible this ‘devilish sign’ related to the ‘tonsure’, which a Christian lawyer stated was worn by druids, satirists and fian members, but which should not, in his eyes, entitle the wearer to any special legal privileges.4 The druidic hairstyle is named in Tírechán’s seventh-century Memoir of St 1 RIA Dictionary, p. 355, col. 33; Ute Kühlmann, Die irische Ziehkindschaft im europäischen Kontext, 7 bis 16 Jahrhundert (Husum, 2017), pp 158–60; McCone, Pagan past, pp 121–2, 126–7. 2 M.J. Enright, ‘Fires of knowledge: a theory of warband education in medieval Ireland and Homeric Greece’ in Próinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter (eds), Ireland and Europe in the early Middle Ages: texts and transmission (Dublin, 2002), pp 342–67; William Sayers, ‘Martial feats in the Old Irish Ulster cycle’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 9:1 (June 1983), 45–80. 3 See Richard Sharpe, ‘Hiberno-Latin laicus, Irish láech and the devil’s men’, Ériu, 30 (1979), 75–92; Kim McCone, ‘Werewolves, cyclopes, Díberga and Fíanna: juvenile delinquency in early Ireland’, CMCS, 12 (Winter 1986), 1–22; idem, ‘The Celtic and Indo-European origins of the fían’ in S.J. Arbuthnot and Geraldine Parsons (eds), The Gaelic Finn tradition (Dublin, 2012), pp 14–30. 4 D.A. Binchy (ed.), ‘Bretha Crólige’, Ériu, 12

404

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Fig. 29 Head of ‘the Rhynie Man’ (Pictish stone carving), courtesy of the Aberdeenshire Council Archaeology Service ©. Fig 30 White Island, Fermanagh, statue of King David (identified as the psalmsinger by pointing to his mouth). Photograph from Welch Collection, National Museums of Northern Ireland.

Patrick as airbacc giunnae,5 a phrase Maud Joynt has analysed as meaning ‘frontal curve of the tonsure’,6 while the style also involved long hair, which the druid Máel (the name means ‘bald’) cut off at Patrick’s command. A crescent-shaped tonsure at the front of the head, with long back-hair is reminiscent of the Pictish stone carving known as the Rhynie Man (see Fig. 29). The same hairstyle may be depicted on an early statue of King David the psalm-singer, on White Island, county Fermanagh. While (1934–8), 1–77: 40; see above, p. 338. 5 Bieler, The Patrician texts, pp 144–5. 6 Maud Joynt, ‘Airbacc Giunnae’, Ériu, 10 (1926–8), 130–4.

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the back of the head is not visible, the front seems to bear a crescent-shaped tonsure, which in an Irish context might be considered appropriate to that stage of David’s life when, hunted by King Saul, he roamed the hills of Israel at the head of a war-band of Jebusites (see Fig. 30). This life of institutional brigandage, known as díberg or fíannas, normally lasted until the youth acquired land, either through the retirement or death of his father, or by way of a clientship contract in which land, instead of or as well as cattle, formed the benefice for which he was to owe his patron renders in foodstuffs and personal service.7 As stated in the Old Irish tract Tecosca Cormaic, the ‘Teachings’ of the legendary high-king Cormac mac Airt: ‘Everyone is a fíanmember until landownership (fénnid cách co trebad)’.8 Landownership brought urradus, citizenship of a particular túath, with obligations to render to its king slógad, cís ocus congbáil, ‘military service, tribute and maintenance (in food and lodging)’.9 Military service could be sub-divided into external forays (fecht ocus slógad, ‘expedition and hosting’) and internal defence (fuba ocus ruba, ‘attack and ward’), an obligation that operated not unlike the medieval English ‘hue and cry’, being the duty of local landowners to turn out when the area was under attack from cattle-rustlers, pirates or wolf-packs.10 The law tract Críth Gablach (c.AD700), which is careful to assert the preeminence of bishops over kings, attempts to restrict the king’s right to summon obligatory attendance at a hosting to three ‘lawful’ occasions: to repel an invasion of the territory, to accompany him to an inter-territorial treaty meeting, or to attack a territory that evaded its obligations.11 Of course the early Irish annals demonstrate that such admonitions did not actually prevent kings from engaging in wars of conquest. The close link between landownership and military service is seen elsewhere in the stipulation that a female heiress who wished to hold a life-interest in the whole of her father’s estate must fulfil the attached military obligations – if she felt unable to afford a proxy, or to find a kinsman who would perform the duty for her, she could only inherit a half-share.12 Not every son of a landowner was able to inherit the normal portion of a freeholder, that is, the bó-aire, who was typically thought of as farming in twenties (20 cows, 20 sheep, 20 pigs etc.). Críth Gablach admits: ‘perhaps four or five men may be in joint-heirship to a bó-aire, so that each of them cannot easily be a bó-aire’.13 A passage in Tírechán’s Memoir on St Patrick suggests that 7 See above, p. 240. 8 This translation in McCone, Pagan past, p. 125. 9 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 130–4; see above, p. 239. 10 Katharine Simms, ‘Gaelic military history and the later Brehon law commentaries’ in Donald Meek and Cathal Ó hÁinle (eds), Unity in diversity: studies in Irish and Scottish Gaelic language, literature and history, Trinity Irish Studies, 1 (Dublin, 2004), pp 51–68, at pp 55–7, 62–3. 11 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 116, 130–1; Binchy, Críth Gablach, pp 20 (ll. 309–13), 106; Charles-Edwards, ‘A contract between king and people’, 107–19 (above, p. 239). 12 Myles Dillon, ‘The relationship of mother and son’, pp 155–6. 13 MacNeill, ‘Ancient Irish law’, 290.

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a pagan solution to an excess of sons was for brothers to fight each other to the death for the inheritance.14 A good-luck charm in the ninth-century Codex Sancti Pauli hints that a less drastic method was to cast lots, with the loser going off to join a fían,15 as younger sons of eighteenth-century English squires joined the army, or younger sons of twelfth-century French nobles became knights errant and crusaders.16 The Christian authors of the Brehon law tracts, as we have seen above, strongly opposed the tonsured druids, satirists and the fíana, ‘for it is more fitting in God’s sight to spurn them than to support them’.17 Críth Gablach seeks an alternative solution to an over-abundance of heirs by recognizing the free status of an ‘aithech ara threba a deich’, a commoner who farms in tens, at half the wealth of the ordinary bó-aire, or even an óc-aire, a junior freeman, who farms in sevens, barely over a third of the wealth of a bó-aire, and shares equipment with his neighbours since he cannot afford his own plough.18 It acknowledges the existence of freeborn men who never acquire land, but though they attain adulthood (‘beard-encirclement’), it accords them only the honourprice of a teenager, a fer midboth, a term that has been interpreted ‘man of middle huts’ (between leaving his paternal home and establishing his own household), or ‘man of mead huts’ (presumably communal feasting shelters in the wilderness used by the fían-bands).19 Nevertheless the same tract accords quasi-noble status to the aire échta, the ‘nobleman of slaughter’, the leader of a small band of five charged with enforcing vengeance for manslaughter where the killer lives beyond the borders, and hence outside the jurisdiction, of the victim’s tuath. This man is identified in legal glosses as a díbergach or féinnid, ‘fían-warrior’,20 and Críth Gablach also depicts a féinnid installed in the feasting-hall of a king, apparently to enforce order and keep the door.21 The law tracts are silent about an obvious third role for the adult féinnid, that of band-leader and trainer of the novice fían members, but characters of this type are prominent in the sagas known as fíannaigecht (stories about the fíana), sometimes described as one-eyed in consequence of the hazards of their profession.22 Literary references go some way to explain the privileged social status accorded to the féinnid in pre-Christian times by implying that practitioners of martial arts were included among the ‘men of art’ or ‘talent’ (áes dána). In the 14 Bieler, The Patrician texts, pp 148–9. 15 McCone, ‘Werewolves, cyclopes, díberga and fíanna’, 12; Whitley Stokes and John Strachan (eds), Thesaurus Paleo-Hibernicus (2 vols, Cambridge, 1901–3), 2, p. 293. 16 Georges Duby, ‘Dans la France du Nord-Ouest au XIIe siècle: les «jeunes» dans la société aristocratique’, Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 19:5 (1964), 835–46: 841. 17 Above, p. 338. 18 Fergus Kelly, Early Irish farming (Dublin, 1997), pp 8, 445–6, 474. 19 McCone, ‘The Celtic and Indo-European origins of the fían’, pp 15–17. 20 Ibid., pp 16–17; McCone, ‘Werewolves, cyclopes, díberga and fíanna’, 7–8. 21  Binchy, Críth Gablach, p. 23, lines 591–2; MacNeill, ‘Ancient Irish law’, p. 306. 22 McCone, ‘Werewolves, cyclopes, díberga and fíanna’, 21–2; idem, ‘The Celtic and Indo-

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Old Irish saga known as the ‘Second Battle of Mag Tuired’, the divine hero Lug, the ‘Many-talented’, seeks entry to the king’s feast at Tara by an enumeration of his multiple arts: ‘Question me, doorkeeper: I am a smith (am gobhae) … I am a champion (am trénfer) … I am a harper (am cruitiri) … I am a warrior (am niadh) …’ and so forth, after which the doorkeeper approaches the king and says: ‘all the arts (dáno) which help your people, he practices them all, so that he is the man of each and every art’.23 However the Christian church could not accept the idea of a man whose profession was killing his fellow men, and who trained others to do so, binding them with oaths that could only be fulfilled by homicide. Moreover, the díbergaig sporadically committed plunder and rape against the settled community, and kept company with druids, satirists and other undesirable elements of society.24 Críth Gablach praises instead the aithech baitside, the ‘baptized commoner’, a man who had settled for a reduced inheritance rather than opting for life in the fían: ‘free from theft, from plunder, from slaying a man except on a day of battle, or someone who sues him for his head; being in rightful wedlock, and faultless on fast days and Sundays and in Lents’.25 As Etchingham points out, these additional religious requirements suggest the author was primarily thinking of ecclesiastical tenants, the so-called manaig (literally ‘monks’).26 Other texts draw deliberate contrasts between the manaig as ‘sons of life’ and the díbergaig as ‘sons of death’; between ‘godly feasts’ to mark church celebrations, and ‘devilish feasts’ to entertain díbergaig, satirists and other low-class or obscene entertainers.27 Initiates into a warrior-band seem to have chosen a nickname or nom de guerre, as we are told the young Setanta had his name changed to Cúchulainn, ‘Hound of Culainn’, after his first exploit.28 Similarly, of course, monks might change their name on entering religion, and we are told that St Columba’s name was changed from Cremthann, or ‘fox’, to Colum Cille, ‘dove of the church’.29 Names like Máel-augrai, ‘tonsured [devotee] of conflict’, were rapidly paralleled and overtaken in frequency by names like Máel Ísa or Máel Sechlainn, ‘tonsured [devotee] of Jesus’ or ‘of St Secundinus’.30 There was even a Cú Chiaráin, ‘Hound of St Ciaráin’, a vice-abbot of Clonmacnois who died in AD809.31 Allusions to both name-changing and bizarre hairstyles were to re-surface as symptoms of a warrior culture in the centuries after the Norman invasion. European origins of the fían’, 19–20, 30. 23 E.A. Gray (ed.), Cath Maige Tuired: the second Battle of Mag Tuired (London, 1982), pp 38–41. For social value set on the fían, see Kevin Murray, The early Finn cycle (Dublin, 2017), pp 59–63. 24 McCone, ‘Werewolves, cyclopes, díberga and fíanna’, 4–6. 25 Eoin MacNeill, ‘Ancient Irish law’, 289: Binchy, Críth Gablach, p.  6, ll. 142–5. 26  Etchingham, Church organization, pp 398–400. 27  Above, note 20. 28 Cécile O’Rahilly (ed.), Táin Bó Cúailnge: Recension I (Dublin, 1976), pp 19, 142. 29 Whitley Stokes (ed.), The Martyrology of Oengus the Culdee (London, 1905), pp 144–7; Andrew O’Kelleher and Gertrude Schoepperle (eds), Betha Colaim Chille: Life of Columcille compiled by Manus O’Donnell in 1532 (Chicago, 1918, repr. Dublin, 1994), pp 40–3. 30 See RIA Dictionary, s.v. ‘3 máel’. 31 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster, pp 264–5 (AD809).

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Meanwhile the church’s viewpoint on what constituted lawful killing and just warfare began to be accepted by secular rulers, most notably in AD697 at the Synod of Birr. Here Abbot Adomnán of Iona persuaded his royal kinsman, Loingsech mac Oengusa, the Cenél Conaill ‘high-king of Ireland’, and ninety other clerical and lay rulers to accede to a countrywide Law of the Innocents, protecting non-combatants, specifically women, clerics and under-age boys, from being attacked or killed, with fines for any violent death of a woman being paid directly to the abbot of Iona. The Law of Patrick followed, which was extended Ireland-wide in 737, directing fines for the death of clergy to the abbot of Armagh.32 This move by the Irish church to limit the violence of warfare, to institute ‘laws of war’, came centuries ahead of the church-sponsored Peace and Truce of God movements found on the Continent between the late tenth and mid-thirteenth centuries.33 Influence from the Continental Truce of God movement, which legislated in the eleventh century to forbid fighting on church holy days and feast days, is seen in Ireland, with the decree in AD1040 by Donnchad son of Brian Boru, king of Munster, forbidding theft or ‘feats of arms’ (enggnam) on Sundays.34 The rather surprising suggestion that theft was permissible on other days no doubt relates to the cattle-raiding nature of Irish warfare.35 A possible last dateable record of a fían warband operating in defiance of Christian influence comes in an entry in the Annals of Ulster for AD847, telling us that the Southern Uí Néill high-king Máelsechnaill I ‘destroyed the Island of Loch Muinremor [Loch Ramor, county Meath] overcoming there fíanlach mar di maccaib báis [‘a large fían-band of sons of death’] of Luigni and Gailenga, who had been plundering the territories in the manner of the heathen’.36 The terms fían and ‘sons of death’ seem clearly to link this incident with the earlier díberg, or pagan warrior cult, but some scholars have seen in the expression more gentilium, ‘after the fashion of heathens/in the manner of the heathen’, a description not of continuity with the past, but a deliberate revival of earlier pagan practices in response to the bad example of the heathen Viking invaders, who had by then been ravaging Ireland for half a century, since their first recorded assault on Rathlin Island in AD795. However, as Dr Lucas painstakingly demonstrated, the early Irish had nothing to learn from Vikings when it came to 32 Etchingham, Church organization, pp 202–4; Thomas O’Loughlin (ed.), Adomnán at Birr, AD697 (Dublin, 2001). 33 See, e.g., T.F. Head and R.A. Landes (eds), The peace of god: social violence and religious response in France around the year 1000 (rev. ed., Ithaca NY and London, 1992). 34 AI, pp 204–5. 35 See Katharine Simms, ‘Warfare in the medieval Gaelic lordships’, Irish Sword, 12 (1975), 98–108; [reprinted in Irishmen in war from the Crusades to 1798: essays from the Irish Sword, 2 vols, intro. Harman Murtagh (Dublin, 2006) 1, pp 44–55]. 36 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster, pp 306–7. Translation of the words in Irish from McCone, ‘The Celtic and Indo-European origins of the fían’, p. 16. Mac Niocaill gave the less precise rendering ‘a large band of wicked men’. The territories or túaith of Luigni and Gailenga are now represented by the baronies of Lune and Morgallion, near Kells, county Meath.

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attacks on churches and monasteries,37 and Sharpe has speculated on the basis of complaints found in saints’ lives, that some of these pre-Viking attacks on churches might have been committed by the warrior bands.38

V I K I N G I N F L U E N C E : T H E R I S E O F M E R C E N A RY S O L D I E R S

As it happened, the main changes to military practice brought about by the advent of the Viking raiders, and their establishment of settlements along the eastern and southern coasts of Ireland in the course of the ninth and tenth centuries were, firstly, a change of weaponry. The early Irish fought with short, stabbing swords, slings and javelins. The Vikings used long, heavy swords, some of them imported from specialist smiths in the north of France, and battle-axes.39 By the twelfth century, the chronicler Gerald of Wales claims that every adult Irishman carried an axe about with him at all times, and it had become their weapon of choice.40 The second important change was the professionalization of warfare. Vikings brought the word suartlech, ‘a mercenary soldier’, into the Irish language from the Norse svartleggja.41 It seems from early medieval Irish literature that formerly kings could bring in cult warrior-bands to reinforce the fighting-men of the túath in time of war. They were referred to as óenchinnidi, ‘sole-kinsmen’, or éclaind, ‘kinless ones’, not only because they were unmarried youths, but (like monks) they had renounced legal membership of their kindred, thus relieving their families who would otherwise owe compensation for their homicides and rapine, and they were described as fighting stark naked, somewhat like the Norse berserkers.42 Not all Vikings were berserkers, however, and once the Norsemen had founded substantial colonies along the east coast of Ireland, they hired themselves out in large numbers to serve the major Irish kings. The Brian Boru saga, ‘The War of the Irish with the Foreigners’ (Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh), 37 A.T. Lucas, ‘The plundering and burning of churches in Ireland, 7th–16th century’ in Etienne Rynne (eds), North Munster studies: essays in commemoration of Mgr Michael Moloney (Limerick, 1967), pp 172–229. Discussion in Kathleen Hughes, Early Christian Ireland: introduction to the sources (London, 1972), pp 148–59; Colmán Etchingham, Viking raids on Irish church settlements in the ninth century: a reconsideration of the annals (Maynooth, 1996); idem, Church organization, pp 205–6; 298–310. 38 Sharpe, ‘Hiberno-Latin laicus, Irish láech and the devil’s men’, 91–2. 39 J.P. Mallory, ‘The world of Cúchulainn: the archaeology of Táin Bó Cúailgne’ in J.P. Mallory (ed.), Aspects of the Táin (Belfast, 1992), pp 103–159; Étienne Rynne, ‘The impact of the Vikings on Irish weapons’ in Atti del VI Congresso Internazionale delle Scienze Preistoriche & Protostoriche, Roma 1962 (Roma, 1966), pp 181–5; idem, ‘An Irish sword of the eleventh century’, JRSAI, 92 (1962), 208–10. 40 O’Meara, Gerald of Wales, p. 107 (Lib. III, cap. C). 41 RIA Dictionary, s.v. ‘súartlech’, ‘súaitrech’; F.J. Byrne, ‘Appendix: Old Norse borrowings into Irish’ in NHI 1, pp 630–4, at p. 631. 42 McCone, ‘The Celtic and Indo-European origins of the fían’, pp 18, 27; Murray, The early Finn cycle, pp 60–2.

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tells us that the tenth-century Vikings of Limerick pressed the surrounding Irishmen into service on their ships, while paying them wages (túarastal).43 It may well have been Irish experience in this region that gave rise to native imitators. The first recorded Irish mercenary troop, a hundred shield-bearing men led by Cathal son of Fogartach (d.968), ‘king mercenary of Ireland’ (rí-amus Érenn), served with Mathgamain, elder brother of the Munster high-king Brian Boru, against the Limerick Vikings.44 King Brian’s own employment of significant numbers of mercenaries or amuis (‘hirelings’) goes far to explain his sudden and unprecedented rise to the position of ‘Emperor of the Irish’, especially as we are told, in the ‘War of the Irish with the Foreigners’, that Brian’s own people, the Dál gCais, had earlier hired themselves out to serve in the armies of other Irish kings before he brought them back to support his own and his brother’s campaign against the Vikings of Limerick.45 The tenth-century saga Cath Almuine, about the ‘Battle of Allen’ which originally took place in AD722 between the northern high-king, Fergal mac Maíle-dúin and the Leinster king, Murchad mac Brain, states that 160 amuis, ‘hirelings, mercenaries’, were killed in the battle, along with the high-king, while the Annals of Tigernach, which are influenced at this point by the saga material,46 speak of Fergal being accompanied by 160 satellites (Latin, ‘retainers’). Interestingly neither source suggests that the other kings taking part in that battle had a similar retinue. Cert cech ríg co réil is a Middle Irish poem, dating therefore between the tenth and the twelfth centuries, but in view of its interest in church reform likely to belong to the later end of this period. It purports to be advice from the churchman, Fothad na Canóine (‘F. of the Scriptures’), to the northern highking, Áed Oirdnide (‘A. the Ordained’, d.819), and its language and contents indicate it was directed at some later king of the Northern Uí Néill. Its main theme, advice to a king, has attracted some comment,47 but in one section it describes the positions allocated to various contingents in the army of the northern high-king as he sets out to conquer the rest of Ireland, and these positions correspond to the geographical location of subject kingdoms in relation to a king facing southwards from a base in or near Derry, suggesting it was directed at a MacLaughlin ruler:

43 J.H. Todd (ed.), Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh: The war of the Gaedhil with the Gaill (London, 1867), pp 48–51. 44 AI, pp 158–9 (AD967, 968); Todd, Cogadh Gaedhel, pp 74–5. 45 AI, pp 166–7 (AD985); Todd, Cogadh Gaedhel, pp 74–5; Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 117–18. 46 Pádraig Ó Riain (ed.), Cath Almaine (Dublin, 1978), pp xxxv–vi, 7; Ann. Tig., 1, pp 188– 90 [228–30]. 47 Donnchadh Ó Corráin, ‘Nationality and kingship in pre-Norman Ireland’ in T.W. Moody (ed.), Nationality and the pursuit of national independence, Historical Studies XI (Belfast, 1978), pp 1–35, at p. 17; Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 25–6, 51, 97, 118.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages Cairpre, Conall [areas of north Sligo and county Donegal] … let them be at your right hand. The fair clan of Colla Uais, the valorous clans of Cian [county Derry], in war and battle-array, let them be at your left hand … The clans of mighty Eógan [Inishowen, Tyrone] … by your side in hard battle … The clan of Colla fo Chrích [Fermanagh, Monaghan] … let them be placed before all … Let the mercenaries (amsaig) of great Ailech, with the curved sword, protect you keenly; let your foreign mercenaries (do gaill) be at your back.48

In terms of geographical layout, behind the peninsula of Inishowen lay the Hebrides, and we know that the Irish were employing visiting auxiliary troops from the Western Highlands of Scotland and the Hebrides from around the year 1000, well before the later influx of Scots galloglass in the thirteenth century, the latter being exiles who actually took up residence in Ireland in the service of Irish  kings. The ‘Annals of Ulster’ record that Brian Boru in resisting the Leinstermen and their Viking allies at the Battle of Clontarf (AD1014) was assisted by the Scottish earl (mormhaer) of Marr.49 This might have been regarded as a political alliance, but when the ‘Annals of Tigernach’ relate that three Scottish mormhair were killed in AD975/6 while supporting the Cenél Conaill king, Gilla Colaim Ua Canannáin, on his invasion of Offaly,50 the political advantage to be gained by the Scots seems unclear and the likelihood that they served for wages appears correspondingly greater. When the northern high-king Muirchertach MacLaughlin hired a fleet from the Western Isles under the command of Mac Scelling to defend himself from the fleets of Toirdelbach O’Conor in 1154, he is expressly stated to have paid for their service.51 A word that begins to come to the fore in Irish literature from the tenth century onwards is ceithern – its basic meaning seems to be a band of people, even applied on occasion to a band of saints, but Sanas Cormaic, the ‘Glossary’ ascribed to Bishop Cormac mac Cuilennáin (d.908), etymologizes the term as signifying ‘a witch’s cauldron, shower of battles and murder, slaughter’ (‘coire aimite, cith cath & orn orgain’),52 indicating the author understood the primary 48 Tadhg O’Donoghue, ed., ‘Cert cech ríg co réil’ in Osborn Bergin and Carl Marstrander (eds), Miscellany presented to Kuno Meyer (Halle a. S., 1912), pp 258–77, at pp 266–9, verses 33–7. 49 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster (to AD1131), pp 448–9 (AD1014). 50 Ann. Tig., 2, p. 339. 51 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster, pp 448–9 (AD1014); AFM 2, pp 1110–13 (1154 AD); Seán Duffy, ‘The pre-history of the galloglass’ in Seán Duffy (ed.), The world of the galloglass: kings, warlords and warriors in Ireland and Scotland, 1200–1600 (Dublin, 2007), pp 1–23, at pp 1–3. See above, p. 86. 52  RIA Dictionary, s.v. ‘ceithern’. Linguistic developments by the tenth century make it possible to envisage an intentional pun here between coire, ‘a cauldron’, and cuire, ‘a warrior band’ – RIA Dictionary, s.v. ‘cuire’; McCone, Pagan past, pp 15, 209, 214. It may well be the same pun is

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meaning as a warband, little different from the earlier fían. The distinction seems to be that rather than a group living outside settled society, dedicated to martial arts ‘for art’s sake’, as it were, for training purposes or with pagan cultic overtones, a ceithern while remaining an independently organized, freelance group, actively sought employment in military service for kings or territories. The annals have little to say about the ceithirne before the advent of the AngloNormans in the late twelfth century, with just one notice for 1101 in the Annals of Tigernach: The conflict in Clonmacnois of two bodies of foot soldiers (ceithernn), namely the Munter Thadgáin and the Munter Cinaetha, and there the Gilla Find, son of Mac Uallacháin, king of Síl Anmchada was killed, together with others.53 The background to this event is obscure, but might be related to three earlier entries in the annals. Two of them, in the Annals of the Four Masters for the years 998 and 1038, refer to fighting between local midland kingdoms taking place in Clonmacnois on St Ciarán’s Day, a high festival which would be attended by many local kings with their retinues, and celebrated by feasting and drinking, making it more likely that faction fighting would break out from time to time among old enemies. The third entry, commemorated in a contemporary satirical verse, Canas ticc macc léginn? (‘Whence come you, learning’s son?’), occurs in the Annals of Tigernach under the year 1050, and records three plundering raids within a three-month period inflicted on the church settlement of Clonmacnois itself, once by the Síl Anmchada (barony of Longford, county Galway) and twice by the ‘Foxes’ of Munter Thadgáin (barony of Kilcoursey, county Westmeath).54 One recalls Sharpe’s view that some early Irish raids on church settlements were the work of díberga or fíanna.55 The thirteenth-century annals supply evidence that the armed bands who succeeded the early warriors might also be indifferent to the church’s claims to sanctuary. Another point of interest is the name of the king of Síl Anmchada, GillaFind. A number of scholars in modern times have commented on a change of nomenclature that occurred around the period of the Viking invasions, from names using the element ‘Máel’ (‘bald’, ‘tonsured devotee’) to names beginning ‘Gilla’ (‘lad’, ‘serving-boy’, ‘servant’). The eminent Norwegian scholar, Carl hinted at in the fourteenth-century bardic address to the chief Tomás Magauran, Díoth cruidh coire Tomás, ‘Devourers of wealth [or ‘cattle’] are the cauldrons of Tomás … for feeding the men (mercenaries) from Alba and the other strangers in Ulaidh’s lands … his cauldron consumes all his cattle-booty’ – McKenna, Book of Magauran, no. 26, verses 1, 6, 10. 53 Ann. Tig., 2, p. 325 [21]. 54 Ann. Tig., 2, p. 282 [190]; Caitilín Ní Maol-Chróin, ‘Macalla as Cluain-mhac-Nóis AD1050’, Galvia, 1 (1954), 15–17; Frank O’Connor, Kings, lords and commons (New York, 1959), p. 46.

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Marstrander, dismissed out of hand the notion that the term derived from Norse sources, and argued in contradiction to Julius Pokorny that as a personal name element it originated just before the Viking period, and the earliest examples were based on colours, especially ‘Dubgilla’, ‘black lad’, but also Cróngilla (‘yellowy-brown lad’), Gormgilla (‘blue[-black] lad’),56 all probably descriptive of hair-colour, as was ‘Gilla Find’ (‘fair-haired lad’) the name of the king of Síl Anmchada who died in the clash of ceithirne at Clonmacnois in 1101. It is striking that the emergence of secular ‘Gilla’ names connected to hair-colour from the eighth century onwards was followed from the mid-tenth century on by religious ‘Gilla’ names, such as ‘Gilla Coimded’ (‘servant of the Lord’), ‘Gilla Críst’, ‘Gilla Ísa’ (‘servant of Christ, of Jesus’) and so on, largely replacing the older ‘Máel’ formations.57 Once again there seems to be a conscious contrast at play, though the secular ‘Gilla’ names are not as obviously threatening. Since there is such widespread condemnation of the institution of díberg or fíannas in the early Irish written records, emanating from churchmen or churcheducated scholars, it comes as no surprise that the poetry and tales glorifying the exploits of various fían bands are very poorly preserved in the earliest strata of written texts, although there is evidence that oral versions were popular with the unlettered public. The Preface to the hymn Amra Choluim Chille, which Máire Herbert has dated to AD1007, contains the allegation that when the Cenél Conaill high-king, Áed mac Ainmirech (d.598), was preparing to banish all the poets (filid) from Ireland, the filid set about composing fían-stories (scéla féne) of their own invention, and things did not happen at all as they related, but it was in order to impose them on the uncouth people (in ciniud mborb) among whom they were then living that eloquent filid invented these lying fictions.58 However, as the cultic warrior-bands became obsolete, and became replaced by bands of professional fighters, the character of the fían-stories changed and developed. The scattered early texts deal with the adventures of different fían-bands in various parts of Ireland, and involve much interaction with supernatural beings, as well as conflict between bands. By the tenth century, the 55 Above, p. 410. 56 Carl Marstrander, ‘Altirische Personennamen mit Gilla’, ZCP, 13 (1919), 1–2; idem, ‘Altir. Gillae’, ZCP, 12 (1918), 309–22; Julius Pokorny, ‘Vermischtes 1, Altirisch gildae, “Junger Mann, Diener”’, ibid., pp 298–304. 57 Marstrander, ‘Altir. Gillae’, 313. 58  Proinsias Mac Cana, ‘Fianaigecht in the pre-Norman period’ in Bo Almqvist, Séamas Ó Catháin and Pádraig Ó hÉalaí (eds), The heroic process: form, function and fantasy in folk epic (Dún Laoghaire, county Dublin, 1987), pp 75–99, at p. 89; text in J.H. Bernard and R. Atkinson, The Irish Liber hymnorum (2 vols, Henry Bradshaw Society, London, 1898), 1, p. 162. See Máire Herbert, ‘The preface to Amra Coluim Cille’ in D. Ó Corráin, L. Breatnach and K. McCone (eds), Sages, saints and storytellers: Celtic studies in honour of Professor James Carney (Maynooth, 1989), pp 67–75.

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figure of one fian-leader, Finn mac Umaill, or mac Cumaill (the Finn McCool of later folklore) predominates. An unhistorical distinction is drawn between pagan, dishonourable díberg warriors, and honourable, quasi-Christian fíana under Finn’s leadership.59 An early poem states that because Finn had the gift of second-sight he could foresee the advent of Christianity to Ireland and he and eight of his followers were converted.60 In the later twelfth- or early thirteenthcentury frame-tale, Accallam na Senórach, ‘The Colloquy of the Ancients’, a small group of survivors from Finn’s fíana meet St Patrick and are baptized, the thousand legions of demons that had been floating over their heads departed in all directions and an angel informed Patrick that it would now be no sin to record their tales, ‘for to the companies and nobles of the latter time to give ear to these stories will be for a pastime’.61 The way was thus cleared for clerical, or clerically trained scribes to revel in narratives of the heroic deeds of the now respectable fíana of Finn. The Accallam draws a portrait of the ideal, chivalrous warrior, redolent of Christian values, in the poetic advice Finn is supposed to give the young Mac Lugach: O Mac Lugach, impetuous one, if you wish to be in vassalage [óclachas, a contract of military service], Be peaceable in a great man’s household, be hardy in the wilderness … Do not mock the holy man nor be involved in quarrels, Keep well away from these two, the witch and the evil man. Two-thirds of your courtesy to women and the household servants, Be kind to poets, makers of art and the common soldiery … Do not forsake your overlord [do ruire, ‘over-king’] for as long as you live; For gold, silver or wealth, do not betray your guarantor [do chomairce, recte ‘he to whom you have promised protection’] … Do not frequent ale-houses, nor be unkind to an old man, Listen to words of good counsel, have no truck with the rabble … Have your armour and weapons ready for the outbreak of sudden battle, Do not be mean with your wealth, be constant in your courtliness [míne, ‘gentleness’], Mac Lugach.62

59 Murray, The early Finn cycle, pp 19, 50–8: McCone, ‘Werewolves, cyclopes, díberga and fíanna’, 4. 60 L.C. Stern, ‘Die Bekehrung der Fianna’, ZCP, 5 (1905), 179–83. 61 Whitley Stokes (ed.), ‘Acallamh na Senórach’, Irische Texte, 4, 1, ll. 290–302; Pádraig Ó Fiannachta, ‘The development of the debate between Pádraig and Oisín’ in Almqvist et al. (eds), The heroic process, pp 183–206, at pp 183–9; Anne Dooley and Harry Roe (trans.), Tales of the Elders of Ireland: a new translation of Accallam na Senórach (Oxford, 1999), p. 5. 62 Dooley and Roe, Tales of the Elders of Ireland, pp 19–20. Square brackets give original Irish terms taken from the text in O’Grady, Silva Gadelica, 1, p. 107, with my suggested literal translations.

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Prose and verse accounts of Finn’s deeds were multiplied in later medieval manuscripts, and became especially popular with the Scottish galloglass families in Ireland, who saw their role as mercenaries in royal service glamorized by these tales, as the young knights of France and England enjoyed seeing their profession idealized in the tales of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table.63 The prose and verse tale, Tochmarc Ailbe, ‘The Wooing of Ailbe’, dated by its editor before the middle of the twelfth century, represents Finn’s fiana as the household troop and ceitherna, ‘kernes’, of the high-king Cormac mac Airt, and states that Finn had served as leader of the ceithern (taisech ceithirne) to Cormac’s father Art, but when a feud developed between Finn and Cormac, Finn drew away young men who were in fiannas to Cormac by offering them ‘counterwages’ (frittuarostol).64 By the first half of the twelfth century, then, the old pagan or ritual associations of warrior-bands seem left behind. The tale takes for granted that ceitherna/‘kernes’, or bands of fighting-men, served kings in return for wages, but it is also implied that they fought under their own leaders, who could decide with whom they took service, and for how long.

I M PA C T O F T H E A N G L O - N O R M A N I N C U R S I O N A N D S E T T L E M E N T

When the Anglo-Normans arrived to conquer and colonize from 1167 onwards, the long struggle that ensued gave employment to kernes on both sides, Irish and Anglo-Norman. The earliest mention of a ceithern after the arrival of the invaders comes in Munster, where the Annals of Inisfallen report the death in AD1206 of Domnall MacCarthy, ‘high-king of Munster’ and count among the exploits of his twenty-year reign that ‘it was he who slew the speckled kerne led by Geoffrey de Cogan, the most hated kerne that ever was in Ireland, and he flayed this Geoffrey’.65 ‘Mac Carthaigh’s Book’, also under the year 1206, states the monastery of SS Peter and Paul (in Knock, county Louth?) was plundered and burned by MacMahon’s ‘bandits’ (ladrannaibh, from the Latin latronibus), led by Bratach Buile Ó Maothagain.66 ‘Bandits’ who are employed by the local king must be understood as a hired war-band, a ceithern, and the name of their leader, ‘Bratach Buile’ (‘Frenzied Battle-standard’), is clearly a nom de guerre, or nickname, adopted after he embarked on his career as a warrior. The clerically authored account of the Anglo-Norman conquest of Connacht which lies behind the unusually full entries in the Annals of Connacht, and of 63  Simms, ‘Gaelic warfare’, pp 102–4; eadem, ‘Images of the galloglass in poems to the MacSweeneys’ in Duffy (ed.), The world of the galloglass, pp 112–15; Ruairí Ó hUiginn, ‘Duanaire Finn, patron and text’ in John Carey (ed.), Duanaire Finn: reassessments, ITS subsidiary series 13 (London, 2003), pp 79–106. 64 Rudolf Thurneysen, ‘Tochmarc Ailbe: Das Werben um Ailbe’, ZCP, 13 (1921), 251–82: 254–5; Kuno Meyer (ed.), Fianaigecht (Dublin, 1910), pp xxvi–xxvii. 65 AI, pp 336–7 (AD1206). 66 Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 83–4 (AD1206).

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Loch Cé for the 1230s,67 includes a number of significant references to ceithirne. Under 1233, we are told that when the young Feidlim son of Cathal Crobderg O’Conor became king: ‘peace and discipline were imposed forthwith upon the armed bands and malefactors of Connacht (ar cethernaib Connacht & ara macaib mallachtan)’.68 The expression meic mallachtan, ‘sons of malediction’ recalls the phrase ‘sons of death’, meic báis, applied by churchmen to the cult warriors of an earlier age, and Sharpe has pointed out that the early twelfth-century ‘Life’ of St Colmán mac Luacháin of Lynn (county Westmeath), couples the mac mallachtan and the díbergach, the cult warrior, as persons so wicked they could not be saved from Hell even by the prayer of St Colmán.69 Under the year 1235  Feidlim’s negative attitude towards the kernes of Connacht becomes understandable in two entries that show them serving Feidlim’s rivals, the sons of Ruaidri O’Conor, and their ally, the conquering Richard de Burgh, and robbing churches against the wishes of their employers, in association with sersénaig (from the Norman-French sergent), heavy-armed foot soldiers whose commanders seem to have been largely of Welsh extraction.70 In 1236, the Connacht annalist complained of: armed bands and evil-doers (cetherna & meic mallachtan) without reverence for church or privilege, being excommunicated by the hands of bishops.71 It is significant that the annalist emphasized the disapproval of the AngloNorman commanders for their troops’ attacks on churches, going so far as to return stolen goods or pay compensation to the clerics. Brian ‘of the Battle of Down’ O’Neill (d.1260), in his campaign to reassert his rule over all the North, is shown in the annals as employing mercenary troops, rúta (from the French routes, routiers), to kill a sub-chieftain, Conchobar Mac Cathmail (MacCawell, McCaul) of the Clogher Valley (county Tyrone) in 1252.72 The ‘Connacht archer’ (saighdeoir Connachtach) who killed another subchief, Gilla Pátraic O’Hanlon of Airthir (south county Armagh), in 1243, may also have done so on Brian’s orders, since Brian certainly commanded the execution of Gilla Pátraic’s successor, Murchad O’Hanlon, in 1246, after apparently holding that chief a prisoner in a crannog near Clonfeakle (county Armagh) before he escaped in 1245 ‘through the miracles of St Patrick’.73 However like the Anglo-Norman employers of mercenary troops in Connacht, 67 Barry O’Dwyer, ‘The Annals of Connacht and Loch Cé, and the monasteries of Boyle and Holy Trinity’, PRIA, 72C (1972), 83–101. 68 Ann. Conn., pp 46–7 (AD1233 §5). 69 Kuno Meyer (ed.), Betha Colmáin maic Lúacháin, Todd Lecture series 17 (Dublin, 1911), pp 106–7; Sharpe, ‘Hiberno-Latin laicus, Irish láech and the devil’s men’, 91. 70 Ann. Conn., pp 51–2, 58–9 (AD1235 §§ 8, 23). For sersénaig see ibid., pp 51–4, §§ 11, 13, 14. For Welsh captains of sersénaig see ibid., pp 66–7, 222–3 (1237 § 2; 1310 §§ 5,6); Simms, ‘Gaelic warfare’, pp 108–10. 71 Ann. Conn., pp 64–5 (AD1236 §16). 72 AU 2, pp 313–14 (AD1252). 73 Ibid., pp 303–4 (AD1245, 1246); Simms, ‘Medieval Armagh’, pp 193–4; Simms, ‘Late medieval Tír Eoghain’,

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Brian may have enforced or aimed to enforce a professional discipline on his soldiers, as this is a prominent theme in his elegy by Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide, a poet who was a zealous supporter of the clergy and church reform:74 A poor man’s cow was not brought to his house, he did not violate a priest’s relic; what did he violate that the battle was routed? There is no church against which he was guilty … Under Brian’s rule a woman would have walked from Sliabh Callainn to Coirrshliabh; travelling amongst the Irish is horrible to me since the hero of Ireland has departed. Ó Néill did not violate church privileges, he did not disobey the church; Brian’s prosperity was swamped by heaven; to be religious after his death is difficult.75 The thirteenth century was a time of transition – through the preaching of the new orders of Dominican and Franciscan friars the last remnants of paganism were being stamped out,76 and the church was increasingly asserting itself over the disorderly elements in society. In 1297, Nicholas Mac Máel Ísa, the primate of Armagh, joined the bishop of Clogher in pressurising the Ulster kings, Domnall O’Neill, Brian MacMahon and Donn Óc Maguire, with their vassal chiefs, into agreeing to a series of articles, in which they promised: … we will preserve all and singular the churches existing in our lands, their clerics and tenants, free and immune from all vexations, namely, thefts, spoils, burnings and all violences and injuries, and from all exactions in money or provisions or under any other name or manner, by kerne, horsemen, keepers of horses and dogs, or any other of our servants … if any theft or spoil be done by any of our men to any church or ecclesiastical person in our lands or any form of the aforesaid exactions be imposed by us on them we shall … levy a penalty of 24 cows from the offender or offenders for every theft, spoil or burning which does not exceed the number of 6 cows or their value. … If the committers of such theft or spoil or those guilty of any kind of the aforesaid exactions are unable to pay, we promise and firmly engage ourselves to seize the offending persons, or the masters of the kerne (magistros turbarum) if they deserve it, and deliver them to the Bishop’s prison.77 The last mention of the cult warrior hairstyle of a shaven front of the head with long back-hair interestingly implies that men of English descent also pp 136–9. See above, pp 98–9. 74 Above, pp 348–9. 75 Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, no. 13, p. 143. 76 Above, pp 292–5, 300. 77 Kenneth Nicholls (ed.), ‘The Register of Clogher’, Clogher Record, 7 (1969–72), 361–431: 415–17. Above pp 241–2, 305–6.

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adopted it on occasion, presumably when joining a ceithern as career mercenaries. In 1297, the same year as the articles of agreement extracted from O’Neill by the primate of Armagh, the Anglo-Irish parliament complained: Englishmen also as degenerate in modern times, attire themselves in Irish garments and having their heads half shaven, grow and extend the hairs from the back of the head and call them Culan, conforming themselves to the Irish, as well in garb as in countenance, whereby it frequently happens that some Englishmen reputed as Irishmen are slain, although the killing of Englishmen and of Irishmen requires different modes of punishment … it is agreed and granted that all Englishmen in this land wear, at least in that part of the head which presents itself most to view, the mode and tonsure of Englishmen, nor longer presume to turn their hair in the Culan.78 This explicit description of the cúlán or ‘long back-hair’ style comes just six years after the death of a king of Tír Eógain called Niall Cúlánach O’Neill (‘N. with the long back-hair’, d.1291), brother of the Anglophile king Áed Buide O’Neill (d.1283). On more than one occasion Niall had contested the kingship in his brother’s lifetime.79 According to the early thirteenth-century fiannaigecht romance, Accallam na Senórach, such frustrated ambition could turn a prince into a díbergach, a cult warrior, as appears in the following dialogue: ‘I am Fulartach son of Fergus’, he said. ‘What is your inheritance?’ asked Patrick. ‘The kingship of Brega and Meath, and of the Déisi of Tara, descends upon me’ the young man said, ‘but I am now a plunderer and marauder [foghlaid ocus díbergach].’ ‘Whom do you plunder?’ asked Patrick. ‘My own brother, Becan son of Fergus.’80 Nothing further is heard of the cúlán as a warrior hairstyle in later centuries. Quite the contrary, the sixteenth-century kerne were well-known for heavy fringes hanging down over their eyes, sometimes apparently back-brushed into a thick mat that might help to protect the head in the absence of a helmet. (See below, Fig. 32)

T H E A DV E N T O F T H E S C O T T I S H G A L L O G L A S S : T H E C O M P O S I T I O N A N D U S E O F L AT E R M E D I E VA L A R M I E S

In the course of the thirteenth century, kings in Connacht and Ulster had been developing increasingly close relations with the Hebridean chiefs through 78 Early Statutes I, pp 210–11. 79 Above, pp 100–1, 103. 80 Dooley and Roe, Tales of the Elders of Ireland, pp 16–17; Irish in square brackets from text in O’Grady, Silva Gadelica,

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military alliance and ties of marriage and fosterage, which gained them the service of the  first troops of ‘galloglass’ (gall-óclaig, ‘foreign warriors’).81 Leabhar Eóghanach, the traditional history of the O’Neill dynasty, compiled in the late sixteenth century, claims that Domnall O’Neill, king of Tír Eógain (1286–1325), was the first to billet galloglass, led by the MacSweeney clan, on his subjects, to strengthen his hand in contesting for sovereignty with the Clann Áeda Buide O’Neills.82 Billeting-rights were soon followed by grants of landed estates to the galloglass leaders. The O’Donnells had settled the MacSweeneys in the peninsula of Fanad (county Donegal) by the mid-fourteenth century, from where they later spread westward to hold the territories of Na Tuatha (see Fig. 31), and eventually Tír Bogaine (barony of Banagh, south Donegal). Fig. 31 Three sketches of At some date before the sixteenth century MacSweeney galloglass, placed in Fanad, na Tuatha and Banagh the O’Neills had established the leaders of the (west Donegal) on a map of Clan Alexander MacDonalds near Ballygawley Ireland drawn by John Goghe (county Tyrone), while the Maguires allotted in 1567. National Archives, Kew, tax-free lands in Fermanagh to the MacCabe Ref. MPF 1/68. constables of Airgialla.83 As heavy-armoured foot soldiers using two-handed swords and long- and short-handled axes, the galloglass were able to form a moving line of defence, a ‘castle of bones’, which could block a pursuing force, or form a position of strength in the heart of a battlefield.84 In contrast to the unruly kerne, they were described by Stanihurst as ‘wayward rather by profession then by nature, grim 1, p. 104. 81  Katharine Simms, ‘Scotland and the politics of Gaelic Ulster’ in David Ditchburn, Sean Duffy and Peter Crooks (eds), The Irish–Scottish world in the Middle Ages, Trinity Medieval Symposium 2 (Dublin, forthcoming). See above, pp 106, 109, 113, 121, 123, 128, Fig. 13. 82 ‘Isé an Domhnall sin tug tomhus ar tús do ghallóglachaibh, .i. do Mhag Buirrche ó bhfuilid Clann Suibhne: agus is do chothughadh cogaidh fria Clainn Aodha Buidhe tug Domhnall an bhuannacht sin amach’ – Ó Donnchadha, Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe, p. 31. 83 Kenneth Nicholls, ‘Scottish mercenary kindreds in Ireland, 1250–1600’ in Duffy (ed.), The world of the galloglass, pp 86–105; John Marsden, Galloglas: Hebridean and West Highland mercenary warrior kindreds in medieval Ireland (East Linton, 2003). 84 Simms, ‘Warfare in the medieval Gaelic lordships’, [pp 53–4].

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of countenance, tall of stature, big of lime, burly of body, wel and strongly timbered, chiefly feeding on beefe, porke and butter.’85 They were famous for their strict discipline and unwavering loyalty to their paymasters, most famously demonstrated at the Battle of Knockdoe, in Connacht, where they fought until, the annals say: ‘the place wherein were nine battalions of galloglasses in compact array of battle, there escaped not alive of them but one thin battalion alone’.86 They charged a correspondingly high fee for their services, and we have an ironic verse attributed to the sixteenth-century Leitrim chieftain, Brian na  Múrtha O’Rourke (d.1591), when his galloglass leader, MacDowell, uncharacteristically fled from the battlefield, complaining that he could have employed Irishmen to run away free of charge!87 In addition to these various mercenary troops, local kings still had a claim on the military service of the landowning families in their territory. Later commentaries on the Old Irish law tracts, ranging in date from about the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, speak of a system of fines for nonattendance (meth slóigid) when a hosting has been duly and publicly proclaimed: a cow from every commoner, that is, from the fer midboth up to the best bóaire … and this is the period [of notice] for every hosting: three days for them to seek armour and shoes, or the duration of the hosting and the duration of the summons should be equal, and no hosting is longer [than three days].88 Another passage of commentary on the same phrase, meth slóigid, makes clear that where a lord with clients is summoned, the clients go to battle under their patron’s command, and the fine for the non-attendance of nobles is greater than for commoners, because ‘the hosting is more hindered through the absence of the noble ranks, than the commoner ranks’.89 Other sources, both Irish texts and Anglo-Irish contracts with submitting Gaelic chieftains, distinguish between a short expedition of three days (probably to be identified with the term fecht), and a longer hosting (slóiged), with mention of a forty-day period. Sometimes agreements contrast cross-border raids, where the subject ruler and his force must bring their own supplies, and more distant expeditions, where the overlord who has summoned them will provide for their 85 Richard Stanihurst, ‘The description of Irelande’ in Miller & Power, Holinshed’s Ir. Chron., pp 7–116, at p. 114. 86  AU 3, pp 470–1 (AD1504); Donal O’Carroll, ‘The Battle of Knockdoe, 19 August, 1504’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 56 (2004), 46–59: 57; see above, pp 209–10. 87 ‘A meic Dúbhghaill gherreannaigh . ar nach fríth baoghal basgaidh / an bhuannacht do bheirmís-ne . [do] chionn treigion an ghaisgidh / ’s go bhfuighmis Éirionnoigh . do theithfeadh dhuinn a n-aisgidh.’ RIA MS 1007 (23/L/34), 218. 88 CIH, 2, pp 723–4; Katharine Simms, ‘The contents of later commentaries on the Brehon law tracts’, Ériu, 49 (1998), 23–40: 26–7. 89 CIH, 2, pp 1169–70; Simms, ‘The contents of later commentaries’, 28–9.

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Fig. 32 A cattle-raid, from John Derricke’s The image of Irelande (1581).

food and lodging, pay wages and sometimes pledge to pay compensation for all deaths occurring in the ranks.90 The legal commentary cited above also discusses the responsibility as between king and people when a subject territory refuses to join a hosting. The tuath pays the [the fine] to him [the local king] if he has summoned them and they did not go with him in his hosting, and the tuath does not pay a fine to the high-king provided their own king has not summoned them, and the king of the tuath pays fine to the high-king.91 The principle of divided responsibility here compares quite well with a passage in the sixteenth-century tract on the ‘Right of O’Neill’ (Ceart Uí Néill) dealing with his rights to hosting-duty from Fermanagh: The lordship of Ó Néill over the Feara Manach … a hosting of two hundred men; and if those two hundred should not come, a cow for every man lacking of them; and two in-calf cows for every cow that is not delivered. And if Mag Uidhir himself should come on hosting without his people, he shall receive half the fine … 92 90 Simms, ‘Gaelic military history and the later Brehon law commentaries’, 60–1; Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 101–3. 91 CIH, 2, p. 723, ll. 39–40–p. 724, l. 1; Simms, ‘The contents of later commentaries’, 27. 92 Myles Dillon (ed.), ‘Ceart Uí Néill’, Studia Celtica,

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Fig. 33 Irish warriors on horseback – Market Cross, Kells, east face of base, ?tenth century. Roger Stalley collection © TRIARC Trinity Irish Art Research Centre.

However, the distinction here is that the number of men to be sent to the hosting summons is fixed, allowing the overlord to know precisely how many are missing, and how much therefore is the amount of the fine due. This seems to reflect a growing professionalism of the fighting forces, in particular of the foot soldiers. The detailed account of the Norman conquest of Connacht in the early thirteenth-century annals suggests that the tinól oirechta, the hosting of ordinary freemen of a district summoned to war, had two major disadvantages – they were untrained and the first to run away, and their priority was their own farmlands, and they would desert an expedition to go back and defend these if need be.93 In time it came to suit both the subjects and overlord if paid substitutes for the humble foot soldiers were sent in response to the hosting summons, and the ceremonial gift or payment awarded to sub-chieftains as they pledged allegiance to their king became known from the eleventh century onwards as tuarastal, ‘wages’, binding them to ‘service of raid, hosting, hostages and escort … and to accompany him at every need’.94 1 (1966), 1–18: 7. 93 Ann. Conn., pp 10–11, 14–15, 18–19 (AD1225 §§ 8, 16, 25). Simms, From kings to warlords, p. 121. 94 Myles Dillon, ‘The inauguration of O’Conor’ in J.A. Watt, J. Morrall and F.X. Martin (eds), Medieval studies presented to Aubrey Gwynn (Dublin, 1961), pp 186–202, at pp 190–1, 198; Simms, From kings to warlords, p. 101.

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The kerns who replaced the amateur foot soldiers had less distractions from the business of warring, but they often fought without helmet or armour, wielding pointed wooden javelins rather than swords or shields. Their business was chiefly to burn houses and crops, and round up and drive off cattle.95 (See Fig. 32) Aristocratic landowners fought on horseback, and had done so from at least the eleventh century96 (see Fig. 33) Like knights in England and on the Continent, aristocratic horse-warriors were highly trained – at the end of the fourteenth century the interpreter for a group of Irish kings, including Niall Óc O’Neill (d.1403), who were being prepared to receive knighthood at the hands of Richard II in AD1395 was told that: … they were knights already … I asked when they were made; they answered at seven years old; that in Ireland a king makes his son a knight, and should the child have lost his father, then the nearest relation; and the young knight begins to learn to tilt with a light lance against a shield fixed to a post in a field, and the more lances he breaks the more honour he acquires. ‘By this method’, added they, ‘are our young knights trained, more especially king’s sons.’97 Unlike Continental or English knights, they commonly rode without saddle or stirrups, in fact when King John of England presented Cathal Crobderg O’Conor, king of Connacht (d.1224), with a fine war-horse, saddled and harnessed, the Irish king removed the saddle and was well able to manage the horse without it.98 Irish horse warriors continued to fight without stirrups, and with a small cushion instead of a saddle, up to the late sixteenth century (see Fig. 34). The lack of stirrups meant that the Irish cavalry held their spears overarm and stabbed downwards at their opponents, rather than charging with lances couched under their elbows for maximum impact, as without the purchase given by stirrups this would simply have unhorsed the charging warrior himself. There were a number of practical reasons for the Irish horse-warriors’ failure to imitate the equipment of Continental knights. Already in the late twelfth century the Cambro-Norman chronicler, Gerald of Wales, observed: In France men choose the open plain for their battles, but in Ireland and Wales rough, wooded country; there heavy armour is a mark of distinction, here it is only a burden; there victory is won by standing firm, here by 95 Simms, ‘Warfare in the medieval Gaelic lordships’, [pp 50–1]. 96 AI, pp 250–1 (AD1095); ALC 1, pp 84–5 (AD1099). See Marie Thérèse Flanagan, ‘Irish and Anglo-Norman warfare in twelfth-century Ireland’ in Bartlett and Jeffery (eds), A military history of Ireland, pp 52–75, at pp 63–4, 69. 97 Johnes, Froissart, 2, p. 580. 98 Seán Duffy, ‘King John’s expedition to Ireland AD1210: the evidence reconsidered’, IHS, 30 (1996), 1–24: 11–13.

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Fig. 34 Irish horsemen in retreat, from John Derricke’s The image of Irelande (1581).

mobility … when the fighting takes place only within a restricted space, or over wooded or boggy ground, where there is scope for foot soldiers rather than horsemen, light armour is far superior … it is inevitable that an enemy who is mobile and in retreat over confined or difficult terrain can only be routed by an equally mobile force pressing hard on them and only lightly armed. For owing to the weight of that armour with its many layers, and saddles which are high and curved back, men have difficulty in dismounting, even more difficulty in mounting, and find advancing on foot, when the need arises, most difficult of all.99 Apart from strategic considerations, the small size of Irish horses, on the scale of the larger Connemara ponies, made heavy armour impractical.100 Moreover, while chain-mail could be made using the services of the local smith,101 plate armour required more advanced technology, and had to be imported into Ireland, smuggled, indeed, because fourteenth-century legislation by the AngloIrish parliament forbade the sale of arms or armour to the Gaelic Irish in peace 99 Scott & Martin, Expugnatio, p. 247. 100 Anthony Dent and Daphne Machin Goodall, The foals of Epona (London, 1967, reprinted as A history of British native ponies: from the Bronze Age to the present day (London, 1988)), pp 100–1, 108, 126, 133, 148, 152, 154–8. 101 McKenna, Book of Magauran, no. 3, verses 18, 20; Knott, Tadhg Dall, no. 11, verse 19.

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or war,102 though horse harness and armour was sometimes seized from the bodies of slain English adversaries.103

T H E S E L F - I M A G E O F A R I S T O C R AT I C WA R R I O R S

There is evidence that on the comparatively rare occasions when Gaelic armies were involved in pitched battles, the horsemen might dismount and fight on foot.104 Normally, however, horsemen rode ahead and behind the main force of foot soldiers, in front as reconnoitring and foraging parties (sirthe),105 or behind, defending the rear of a retreating army – that is, either retreating while escorting cattle, women and children away from the danger zone during an enemy attack, or protecting the rear of a victorious army retreating with their prey.106 This gave the aristocratic cavalrymen a prominent role as the main defenders of the ordinary people, whether refugees or foot soldiers. In the fifteenth century the annals mention one occasion in 1434 when the young princes Henry son of Eógan and his brother Áed ‘of the Fews’ O’Neill are credited with saving the lives of their followers by their defence of the rearguard, and another a year later, when Henry and Áed O’Neill gallantly led their troops back in the middle of the night to recapture a camp-site on the Donegal border from which they had been ousted by O’Donnell: Henry Ua Neill made good discourse to Mac Domnaill [the constable of the galloglass] and to his own kinsmen and to his followers: namely, that they should have good courage against their enemies. Not blackening of night and not blanching of visage did the nobles act at that incentive and they marched forward afterwards quietly, silently, until they reached the camp. Howbeit, Henry Ua Neill went in front of them courageously, victoriously and powerfully, full splendidly, until they reached the very centre of their enemies … And heroes were hacking at one another on every side. Moreover, the friends and the enemies recognized not each other in that contest, through darkness of the night and through thickness of the heroic force. Howbeit, balls of fire leaped from the helmets of the champions and from the breastplates of the heroes … Ua Neill on that occasion went home triumphantly, and so on.107 102 Early Statutes I, pp 432–3, 498–9. (40 (Ed.) III, 18 Ric. II). 103 AU 2, pp 342–3 (1270); O’Grady, Caithréim, 1, p. 15; 2, p. 17. 104  Simms, ‘Gaelic warfare’, p. 107; O’Grady, Caithréim, 1, pp 40, 68; 2, pp 39, 63. See Rhoda Kavanagh, ‘The horse in Viking Ireland: some observations’ in John Bradley (ed.), Settlement and society in medieval Ireland (Kilkenny, 1988), pp 89–121, at p. 97. 105 See, e.g., Ann. Conn., pp 366–9, 504–5, 514–15, 532–3 (1398 § 2; 1461 § 25; 1463 § 11; 1466 § 13); RIA Dictionary, s.v. ‘siriud’ (d). 106 Simms, ‘Warfare in the medieval Gaelic lordships’, 103–5 [pp 48–50]; Simms, ‘Gaelic warfare’, pp 107–8. 107 AU 3, pp 130–3 (AD1434), 134–9 (AD1435), my square brackets. See, pp 171–2 above.

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The phrase ‘and so on’ at the end of this entry shows that it was an abbreviated version of a still-longer account of the triumphs of Henry O’Neill, pitched in a style of high romance, which portrayed his deeds as comparable to the heroes of the Fiannaighecht, sagas about Finn mac Cumaill and his warrior bands, the fíana, or like Cú Chulainn and the Ulster heroes of the Red Branch in Emain Macha. We have evidence that during the most successful era of the Gaelic resurgence, when most ground was being recaptured from the colonists in the second half of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century, the Gaelic chiefs were not merely being praised in heroic terms by the chroniclers and poets, but they were actively courting this heroic image by their own actions. This is seen in the great nationwide feasts they held for poets and chroniclers and other men of learning,108 one of which, in 1387, was held by Niall Óc O’Neill in the actual Iron Age fort of Emain Macha. Some years earlier, in 1375, his father, Niall Mór O’Neill, had threatened to locate his chief seat, his longfort, in Emain Macha, regardless of the fact that this now lay in the church lands of the archbishop of Armagh.109 At this period the Gaelic nobility deliberately sought to present a primitive and heroic outward appearance, going barefoot and barechested in the depths of winter, and objecting to wear silks or furs even when pressed upon them as gifts110 – in contrast to the earlier recorded attitudes of O’Neill and O’Cahan to presents of robes and furs in 1271, or later, Henry son of Eógan O’Neill in 1463, or the sixteenth-century O’Donnells, who emulated the Tudors in splendid attire.111 This barefoot phase around AD1400 coincides with the reign of Tomás Mór Maguire, king of Fir Manach (reigned 1395–1430), who was best known by his nickname An Gilla Dub, ‘the Black(-haired) Lad’. This may have been in commemoration of a collateral relative, the Gilla Dub Maguire who was drowned in 1342 defending the rear of a plundering party.112 In the case of Tomás Mór we know for certain that it was not his baptismal name, recalling the noms de guerre beginning with ‘Gilla’ and followed by a colour adjective, which surfaced in the Viking period and were discussed by Marstrander.113 Tomás Mór Maguire’s own reputation was largely peaceful: a man that frequently set up oratories and churches and monasteries and holy crosses and images of Mary, and established peace amongst clergy and laity and defended his territory against its neighbours.114 108 O’Sullivan, Hospitality, pp 76, 115–16; Katharine Simms, ‘Guesting and feasting in Gaelic Ireland’, JRSAI, 108 (1978), 67–100: 90–2. 109 Katharine Simms, ‘Propaganda use of the Táin in the later Middle Ages’, Celtica, 15 (1983), 142–9; Smith, Reg. Sweteman, pp 11–12. See above, p. 131. 110 Simms ‘The barefoot kings’, pp 4–5. Above, pp 42, 131–2; below, p. 466. 111  Above, pp 103, 189; see Simms, ‘The barefoot kings’, pp 17–18. 112 AU 2, pp 466–7. 113 Above, footnote 56. 114 AU 3, p. 111 (AD1430).

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However the fashion of warlike Gilla nicknames was to become more commonly recorded in the turbulent sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, perhaps because a practice already established amongst the professional ceithernaig, the kernes, had spread to galloglass leaders and aristocratic warriors whose names and nicknames found their way into the annals and state papers. This trend seems to have affected the highest ranks in society, such as Richard ‘the Devil’s Hook’ Burke, or Matthew O’Neill, Baron Dungannon, who was known as Fer  Dorcha [‘Dark Man’] in Irish.115 Most intriguing is the statement by a seventeenth-century observer that such nicknames were formally bestowed: in all places almost divers are called by names, proper only, for the devil, as farr Dorregh [Fer Dorcha ‘dark man’], and Gullygrawny [Gilla Gráinne, ‘hateful lad’], Gully Gromy [Gilla Gruamda, ‘Gloomy lad’], Gulley Duff [Gilla Dub, ‘black lad’] and the like, and theis last are but nicknames imposed vpon them by aduise of some witches or such disciples of Satan, at such time as after their baptisme the yong infants fall sicke, or vpon some such occasion, for by bearing this name, the witches doe perswade the silly mothers of those children, that they shall lieu long and proue fortunate and the like, a meare fallacy of the devill, to drawe them to forsake their Christianity and surely I haue observed it, that most commonly all those that carry, theis markes and noates of satan, come to some desperate end, or other.116 This circumstantial account raises the question as to whether the archbishop of Armagh, Milo Sweteman, who in a letter to Niall Mór O’Neill c.1375 described his anti-social younger sons, Henry Aimréid (‘H. the Turbulent’) and Cú Ulad Rúad (‘C. the Red-haired’) O’Neill, as ‘hunters ordained by the devil’ (venatores a diaboli ordinati),117 was simply indulging in ecclesiastical rhetoric, or whether he was thinking of some kind of actual rite or oath.118 Colmán Etchingham, in relation to earlier clerical condemnation of the bands of díberga in pre-Viking times, has been at pains to point out that accusations that they took devilish vows, and belonged to a devil’s school, cannot be understood as evidence for the persistence of traditional paganism; it conveyed rather that the díberg way of life, involving murder, plunder and rape, was fundamentally opposed to Christian teaching.119 Interestingly, the ‘late Middle 115 See Colm Lennon, Sixteenth-century Ireland: the incomplete conquest (Dublin, 1994), pp 154–6; AFM 5, pp 1562–3 (AD1558). 116 ‘Discourse on the mere Irish of Ireland’, Exeter College Oxford, MS 154, ff. 55–74 at ff. 69v–70r. Transcription by Hiram Morgan at www.ucc.ie/celt/texts/E600001–004.xml Accessed 10/2/2017. 117 Above, p. 313. 118 See references in the early fifteenth century to the misdeeds of Henry Aimréid’s sons and grandsons against the clergy of Derry diocese and an excommunication by the bishop of Raphoe of persons said to be ‘bound by the devil as if in cords’; p. 373 above.

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Irish saga’ he cites in this context, Immram Curaig Úa Corra, ‘The Voyage of the Húi Corra’, has since been analysed in greater detail by Caoimhín Breatnach and found to consist of two sections, an earlier Middle Irish tale of an allegorical voyage by pilgrim saints, and a later introduction, which could be dated linguistically ‘up to at least a century after 1152’.120 This more modern introductory section tells the tale of a wealthy Connacht briugu or ‘hospitaller’ and his wife, whose children all died at birth until they took a resolution to make a pact with the devil, after which the wife gave birth to healthy triplets, Lóchán, Énne and Silvester, the three saints’ names associated with New Year’s Eve in the Martyrology of Óengus. They are said to have undergone ‘a heathen baptism’ (ro baistedh doréir an bhaisteadh geinntlídhe iad).121 When the youths discovered their origin: ‘If ’, say the sons, ‘it is the Devil who is our king or lord, it is hard for us not to rob and plunder and persecute his enemies, that is, to kill clerics and to burn and wreck churches’. Then those sons arose, and they took their weapons and went to Tuam, and they wrecked and burnt the place, and committed robbery and outrageous brigandage (díbhearg) throughout the province of Connacht upon churches and clerics.122 The pilgrim voyage section was then explained as following on their later repentance. Since the brothers’ ravages are centred on Connacht and the cathedral of Tuam, we may have here a literary reflection of the annals’ condemnation of ‘kernes and sons of malediction’ who robbed churches in the course of the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman conquest of Connacht,123 but the tale was to strike a chord with fifteenth-century readers, developing both a prose and a prose and poetry format.124 By the fifteenth century many of the Irish nobility were in a position to read romantic tales and sagas for themselves. Some even knew Latin, like the Munster chief, Fingin O’Mahoney (Ó Mathgamna), who translated the ‘Travels of Sir John Mandeville’ into Irish.125 Richard Kaeuper has argued in relation to Continental chivalric literature that it exercised a direct influence on the ideals and even the actions of literate knights, though he points out:

119 Etchingham, Church organization, p. 304. 120 Caoimhín Breatnach, ‘The transmission and structure of Immram Curaig Ua Corra’, Ériu, 53 (2003), 91–107: 107. 121 Whitley Stokes (ed.), ‘The Voyage of the Húi Corra’, Revue Celtique, 14 (1893), 22–69: 29. 122 Stokes, ‘The Voyage’, 26–9. 123 Above, p. 417. 124 Breatnach, ‘The transmission and structure of Immram Curaig Ua Corra’, 92–9. 125 Simms, ‘Literacy and the Irish bards’, pp 249–52; eadem, Medieval Gaelic sources, pp 87–90.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages We cannot expect this literature, or any other, to serve as a simple mirror to social reality in the world in which it emerged. Chivalric literature was an active social force, helping to shape attitudes about basic questions … most medieval writing about chivalry will show a tendency to social criticism or even a reformist cast … much of it was written in the shadow of fears for public order.126

If we are to apply these arguments to late medieval Irish sagas, continued interest in the ‘The Voyage of the Húi Corra’ reflects continuing disquiet at the unruliness of the freelance mercenary bands, the kernes, and their disregard for Christian morality. Just as the tenth-century Glossary of Bishop Cormac mac Cuilennáin defined the word ceithern as ‘a witch’s cauldron, shower of battles and murder, slaughter’,127 the popular sixteenth-century etymology of the word was cioth Ifrinn, ‘a shower of Hell’.128 The other burning issue as regards military organization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was coinnmed, or ‘coigny’, the practice of maintaining troops of mercenary soldiers by billeting them on the ordinary population, individual soldiers taking their food and sometimes even their wages from the householder to whom they were assigned. This substitute for a money tax on every household to pay for the soldiers who defended them from outside attack was the natural outcome of the barter economy that prevailed across much of Ireland, but it was wide open to abuse. The soldiers demanded better food than the household themselves normally ate, and extorted payments additional to their agreed wages under the ironic heading of faigde, or ‘foye’, a ‘courtesy’, and they enforced their demands by beatings, or confiscation of the farmer’s draught animals.129 The same regime prevailed in the English Pale in the opening years of the sixteenth century, as an anonymous complainant expressed it, drawing on a lost earlier tract Salus Populi by ‘Panderus’, arguing that the Dublin government should return to direct military service rather than the billeting of mercenary troops: What comyn folke in all this worlde is so power, so feble, so ivyll besyn in town and fylde, so bestyall, so greatly oppressid and trodde under fote, and farde so evyll, with so great myserye, and with so wrecheid lyif, as the comen folke of Irelande? … The Kinges armye in Ingland is the comyns; the kinges army in Ireland is all suche that oppresse the comyns.130 Strikingly, we find much the same viewpoint put into the mouth of King Cormac mac Airt in the fifteenth-century saga Cath Fionntrágha or ‘The Battle of Ventry’: 126  R.W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and violence in medieval Europe (Oxford, 1999), pp 32–5. 127 Above, note 52. 128 Alan Harrison, ‘The Shower of Hell’, Éigse, 18:2 (1981), 304. 129 C.A. Empey and Katharine Simms, ‘The ordinances of the White Earl and the problem of coign in the later Middle Ages’, PRIA, 75C (1975), 161–87. 130 State papers, Hen. VIII,

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Thereafter Fergus Finnbel (of the Fair Lips) the son of Finn beheld the great number of the fianns of Erinn that had fallen, and he went without leave, without counsel of them to Temair na Rig (Tara of the Kings), where Cormac the son of Art, the high-king of Erinn, was, and he told him of the strait in which Finn and the fianns of Erinn were. ‘I am pleased,’ said Cormac, ‘that Finn is in that strait, for not one of the husbandmen that we (shall) have dares to touch a pig, or an animal, or a trout, or salmon, or a roebuck, when he finds it dead at the head of any road, he dares not to take it up from the ground on account of the charge, and no husbandman dares to go from his country place to the old town without paying a screpal to Finn, and none of their women dares be given to a man until she be asked, whether she has a man or a lemán of the fianns of Erinn, and if she has none, a screpal must be paid to Finn before she may marry. And many are the wrong judgments [‘bad judgments’, drochbreathaibh] that Finn has passed on us, and for us victory with the foreigners would be better than with him.’131 Here the underlying criticism seems directed not at kernes, but at the MacSweeney galloglass constables in Tír Conaill, who, as noted earlier, gloried in drawing parallels between themselves and the legendary Fianna.132 As Caoimhín Breatnach has convincingly argued, the fifteenth-century version of the saga Cath Finntrága, ‘the Battle of Ventry’, can be associated with the prolonged struggle for control of the border area of Sligo waged for years between Richard MacWilliam Burke, lord of Mayo, and Áed Rúad I O’Donnell (d.1505), lord of Tír Conaill, assisted by his chief constable, MacSweeney of Fanad. This lasted until the two lords eventually agreed to split authority over the territory of Sligo into western and eastern halves respectively by a treaty concluded in 1476, after O’Donnell’s army had been forced into a retreat across Finntráig on Ballysadare Bay.133 It seems clear the saga was written under Burke patronage. Its invading foreigners, champions led by the ‘king of the World’ and the ‘king of Spain’, are treated in relatively complimentary fashion, while Finn Mac Cumaill and the Fianna of Ireland, as we see in the quotation above, are not presented in an uncritical light. The O’Donnells of Tír Conaill allocated their three MacSweeny constables three sub-chieftaincies, Fanad, Trí Tuatha and Tír Bogaine, subject to a levy of 120 galloglasses each from Fanad and Trí Tuatha, and a further 60 galloglasses from Tír Bogaine, calculated as one galloglass for every two ‘quarters’ of land. pt 3, 1, p. 10. 131 Text in Cecile O’Rahilly (ed.), Cath Finntrágha (Dublin, 1962), p. 24, ll. 740–55; translation from Kuno Meyer (ed.), Anecdota Oxonsiensia: medieval and modern series I: 4: Cath Finntrága (Oxford, 1885), p. 29; square brackets follow transation of Breatnach, below, notes 133, 148. 132  Above, note 63. 133  Caoimhín Breatnach, ‘The historical context of Cath Fionntrágha’, Éigse, 28 (1994–5), 138–55.

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In return the constables claimed the right to billet their forces throughout Tír Conaill, with the right to spend up to three nights in every house, and to make a feasting circuit of the kingdom once a year, and the right to salmon-fishing in the Erne from March to August.134 Such exactions may have inspired the ‘bad judgements’ of Finn we find caricatured in Cath Finntrágha. (See Fig. 31) On the other hand, in contrast to the lawless díberga, the fictional Fianna of Finn display chivalrous standards even in this saga. They do not commit violence against women, they try to prevent boys who are a mere thirteen years old from being exposed to combat, and Finn does not send novice warriors into the thick of battle.135 Other ideals of the Fianna are listed in a tract Airem Muinnteri Finn, ‘The Enumeration of Finn’s People’, contained in British Library manuscript Egerton 1782, compiled AD1516–18 for the chief Art Buide MacMurrough Kavanagh: in satisfaction of their guarantee violated they must not accept material compensation; in the matter of valuables or of meat [they] must not deny any; no single individual of them to fly before nine warriors.136 The insistence that violation of a warrior’s guarantee should be avenged with blood rather than material or monetary compensation is linked to the concept of enech, ‘face, honour’, and the institution of comairce, whereby a noble, not necessarily a ruler, undertakes to protect another who requests shelter. If a subsequent attack on the protégé were to go unavenged, the protecting noble would lose face, his honour would be diminished.137 This man-to-man guarantee overrode all other ties of loyalty to king or kindred. In 1451 we are told ‘Cathal, son of Brian Mac Donough, was killed by his own father with a cast of a knife, as the former was in the act of violating his guarantee (sé occa shárucchadh fó a comairge)’.138 The custom was strongly criticized, under the name of ‘comberick’ or ‘commeryke’, by Anglo-Irish administrators who saw it as an excuse for harbouring thieves and outlaws.139 Refusing hospitality to guests was universally considered dishonourable in Irish society,140 and the stipulation that a warrior 134 ‘Ceart Uí Dhomhnaill’, tract in University Library Cambridge MS Add. 2766 (20) 7, ff. 4–8; Breatnach, Leabhar Chlainne Suibhne, pp 42–5; see Simms, Medieval Gaelic sources, p. 120. 135 O’Rahilly, Cath Finntrágha, ll. 142–3, 570–720; 775–8; Meyer, Cath Finntrága, pp 6, 22–8, 30. For locating relevant passages in medieval Fiannaigecht literature, I am indebted to a minor thesis by my former postgraduate, David Maughan, ‘The reputation of the warrior: a study of the reputation received by warrior-bands from contemporary Irish literary reports from the early Christian to the early modern periods’ (M.Phil., TCD, 2005), now deposited in the Centre for Research in Medieval History, Trinity College Dublin. 136 gan crodh do ghabáil na sárugud . gan duini d’éra im shéd ná im biadh . gan teitheadh ré nónbur laech do gach fir díb. O’Grady, Silva Gadelica, 1, p. 92; trans. 2, pp 99–100. 137 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 105–7. 138 AFM 4, pp 974–5 (AD1451). 139 Simms, From kings to warlords, p. 112. 140 O’Sullivan, Hospitality, pp 31, 44, 63, 142.

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should not flee before any nine opponents may be echoed in the cliché that soldiers’ defeat was excusable if they were ‘outnumbered ten to one’. Another virtue much admired by Irish warrior society was physical endurance. Praise-poem after praise-poem lauds the patron for sleeping out in the woods before a raid, lying on the hard ground in full armour.141 Disregarding inclement weather was also a mark of honour. The poet sang of Niall Óc O’Neill (d.1403): He goes through the blinding storm to give battle … Facing the cold storm he comes south from Toraidh; neither in the day of the cuckoo nor in that of the wild goose is he loth to fight.142 Áed son of Art Magennis (d.1424) was praised for sleeplessly riding sentinel along the passes into Ulster on cold winter nights without ever removing his hands from his reins or his spear-shaft.143 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English commanders sometimes note that native Irish troops were fitter and more resilient in campaigning conditions than the soldiers they brought with them.144 The ordinary kerne had a reputation for savagery, and their disregard of the generally accepted laws of war horrified their opponents when they were deployed in France and Scotland, but appealed to King Henry VIII for precisely that reason.145 Even aristocratic warriors were compared to rabid hounds while in the heat of conflict,146 although they were urged to be gentle at all times with ladies and poets. This dual personality of the ideal warrior is particularly brought out in a poem addressed to King Toirdhealbhach ‘of the Wine’ O’Donnell (d.1423): Thy spirit delights when thy hand is bloody; thy pride boils when thou findest opposition. O son of Niall, thou performest every generous deed thou thinkest of; thou dost go where the ladies are until thy battle-steed is brought to thee. 141 See DiD, poem 98, verse 22; Lambert McKenna (ed.), The Book of O’Hara (Dublin, 1951), poem 8, verse 33; 9, verse 25; Carney, Poems on the O’Reillys, no. 19, verse 19; ABM, no. 361, verse 25; Mac Airt, Leabhar Branach, no. 51, verse 13. 142 Aithd., no. 15, verses 9, 33. See above, p. 136. 143 DiD, poem 96, verses 13–16. See Katharine Simms, ‘Images of warfare in bardic poetry’, Celtica, 21 (1990), 608–19: 613, and above, p. 41. 144 Lennon, Sixteenth-century Ireland, p. 89; J.H. Ohlmeyer, ‘The wars of religion, 1603–1660’ in Bartlett and Jeffery (eds), A military history of Ireland, pp 160–87, at pp 178–80. 145 S.G. Ellis, ‘The Tudors and the origins of the modern Irish states: a standing army’ in Bartlett and Jeffery (eds), A military history of Ireland, pp 116–35, at p. 131. 146 Mac Airt, Leabhar Branach, no. 58, verse 28; Carney, Poems on the Butlers, no. 7, verses 34, 41; DiD, nos. 102, verse 38; 111, verse 16; Greene, Duanaire Mhéig Uidhir, no. 18, verse 9; ABM, no. 441, verse 61; Owen McKernan: ‘“Treóin an cheannais” by Gofraidh Óg Mac an Bhaird’, Éigse, 5 (1945), 8–24: 18–19, verse 40.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages That right hand of thine – by its deftness in hurling thou shalt win every lady’s love; on entering the ladies’ hall thou shalt tie up thy hound and thy steed … thy hound obeys thy ladies – in this way thou too art controlled! (?)147

The ladies’ role in this warlike society will be examined in the following chapter.

147 The Irish text of the last couplet cited reads ‘leis fhosdar thú, a Thoirdhealbhaigh, do chú d’fosdadh d’ingheanradh’: Aithd., no. 20, verses 12–14, 25. The dual personality of the warrior as aggressor and protector is repeatedly symbolized in Irish saga literature as an uncertaintempered mastiff, see Kim McCone, ‘Aided Celtchair maic Uthecair: hounds, heroes and hospitallers in early Irish myth and story’, Ériu, 35 (1984), 1–30.

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CHAPTER

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Court ladies and the place of women in Gaelic society Since the bulk of written records from medieval Gaelic Ireland were produced by male clergy and male members of the professional learned classes, who were writing for aristocratic patrons and patronesses, a disproportionate amount of our information about women in those times deals with the lives of the court ladies, the sisters, wives and mothers of the landowning warrior class, or female relatives of the clerical and learned classes themselves. We have more evidence for the marital affairs of these ladies from Ulster than from anywhere else in Ireland, owing to the survival of a series of registers of the archbishops of Armagh, recording appeals of marital cases from church courts in the northern dioceses.1

W O M E N ’ S P L A C E I N B R E H O N A N D C A N O N L AW

The contrast between marriage customs and the treatment of women in Ireland and on the Continent was not as dramatic as sometimes claimed, by censorious medieval observers or modern feminists. What differences there were largely arose from the question of land inheritance, and definitions of legitimate and illegitimate heirs. It used to be argued that women’s rights in Ireland increased with the edifying influence of the Christian church, but more recently it has been pointed out that the contrast between greater and lesser rights for women within the Brehon law system is due not so much to the survival of older, more pagan strata side by side with the new Christian dispensation, but to the contrasting treatment given to women with property and those without.2 A key principle of Brehon law in this context, as stated in the Uraicecht Becc (‘Small Primer’), was that the honour-price, and consequently the legal capacity, of a wife was half that of her husband. This was not a sex-based discrimination, but 1 See Art Cosgrove, ‘Marriage in medieval Ireland’ in Art Cosgrove (ed.), Marriage in Ireland (Dublin, 1985), pp 25–50, at pp 28–34. 2 Gearóid Mac Niocaill, ‘Christian influences in early Irish law’ in Próinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter (eds), Irland und Europa/ Ireland and Europe: the early church (Stuttgart, 1984), pp 151–6, at p. 153, commenting on D.A. Binchy, ‘The legal capacity of women in regard to contracts’ in D.A. Binchy (ed.), Studies in early Irish law (Dublin, 1936), pp 207–34, at pp 207, 210, 226–8.

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a hierarchical one, as between the landowning head of the household and lesser members – the honour-price of the adult son, who maintained him in his old age (gormac), was also fixed at half the amount of the landowner’s own honour-price, similarly that of the steward or major-domo (rechtaire) in the case of the king of a tuath, or the prior, in the case of an abbot.3 The close connection between landownership and full rights as a citizen is shown by the exception made in the case of an heiress (banchomarba), who has married a landless husband, in which case the roles are reversed and the man’s honour-price is half that of his wife.4 However, inheritance of land in this society went exclusively through the male line. The heiress could only inherit a life-interest in her father’s share of the hereditary family lands if she had no brothers, and after her death, her estate reverted to her father’s kindred for redivision. If she wanted to pass on her land to her own sons, she would have to marry a first or second cousin on her father’s side, so their sons could then inherit in his right rather than hers. Canon laws existed to discourage such inbreeding, but the early Irish jurists found justification for the custom in the Old Testament,5 and the practical advantages for a landowner of knowing that his grandchildren would inherit, despite a lack of sons, seems to have ensured that the practice persisted into the high Middle Ages. There are even two late hymns of spiritual courtship addressed to the Virgin Mary, attributed to the sixteenth-century Aengus Finn Ó Dálaig, one which begins Meinic do bheirear bean ghaoil, ‘Often one weds a kinswoman’, and a second, Mairg do bhéaradh acht bean ghaoil, ‘Alas for the man who should woo any but his kinswoman’.6 This obviously raises the question of the relationship between native customary law and the canon law of the Western church. In AD1074, as the Gregorian church reform began to spread from England to Ireland, Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury, wrote to the high-king Toirdelbach Mór O’Brien: In your kingdom a man abandons at his own discretion and without any grounds in canon law the wife who is lawfully married to him, not hesitating to form a criminal alliance – by the law of marriage or rather the law of fornication – with any other woman he pleases, either a relative of his own, or his deserted wife, or a woman whom somebody else has abandoned in an equally disgraceful way.7 3 Anc. Laws Ire., 5, pp 70–1; CIH, 6, p. 2273, lines 3–7; p. 2323, lines 12–15. 4 Binchy, ‘The legal capacity of women’, pp 215, 226–7; Kelly, Early Irish law, pp 76, 104–5. 5 Donnchadh Ó Corráin, ‘Marriage in early Ireland’ in Cosgrove (ed.), Marriage in Ireland, pp 5–24, at pp 10–12; idem, ‘Irish law and canon law’ in Ní Chatháin and Richter (eds), Irland und Europa/Ireland and Europe: the Early church, pp 157–66 at pp 157–61. 6 Lambert McKenna (ed.), Dánta do chum Aonghus Fionn Ó Dálaigh (Dublin, 1919), poems 2, 14. 7 Helen Clover and Margaret Gibson (eds), The letters of Lanfranc archbishop of Canterbury, 1057–1089 (Oxford, 1979), p. 71; see Bart Jaski, ‘Marriage laws in Ireland and on the Continent in the early Middle Ages’ in C.E. Meek and K. Simms (eds), ‘The fragility of her sex’?: medieval

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This accuses the eleventh-century Irish of frequent and easy divorce and ignoring the ecclesiastically forbidden degrees of consanguinity and affinity, but does not suggest actual polygamy, which was another accusation levelled at them, though it can only be supported from the text of the Brehon laws by the simple device of translating the word adaltrach, ‘adulteress’, as ‘secondary wife’.8 Local practice across Europe as regards sex and marriage in the eleventh century was often loose enough, but the discrepancy in actual marriage laws, as detailed in Ireland by jurists educated under ecclesiastical influence, resulted from the early date at which the Irish tracts were first drawn up. They show awareness of the pronouncement of Pope Leo the Great (d.461), in accordance with late Roman civil law, that the ideal marriage was publicly celebrated between two freeborn people of equal social status and wealth, that the woman should bring a dowry, and civil law added the man should also contribute a bride-price,9 but whereas in the Ancient World marriage had been a civil contract, with another contract for a man who wished to acquire a concubine, the ninth-century Christian empire of Louis the Pious saw the church becoming much more involved in defining the civil laws of marriage, and as Ireland lay outside the Carolingian empire, this new and stricter definition of marriage at first had passed it by.10 Apart from the unusual case of the female heiress (banchomarba), the wife who wielded most influence was in a ‘marriage of joint contribution’ (lánamnas comthinchur) where both families had contributed the goods and livestock for the new household. Since the marriage was open to dissolution on many grounds, at which time the wife’s family might be expected to claim back their contribution, the wife had a right and duty to oversee her husband’s subsequent property transactions, and to enter an objection within a specified period to those bargains she considered disadvantageous. She could engage in transactions herself to the value of her honour-price, under a similar oversight of the deal by her husband. In marriages formed with property contributed only from the husband’s side, the wife’s powers were more limited. There was a provision that where a wife, through no fault of her own, was too ill to fulfil her marital duties, or was barren, a man might continue to maintain her in the style to which she was accustomed, but bring in an additional wife (cétmuinter ar muin araile), to perform the roles she could not. Moreover, men could acquire concubines by formal contract with the family of the woman in question or even her existing husband, if he had no objection, sealed by the payment of a ‘bride-price’ to the kindred. In the case of concubines residing in the man’s household, their status was increased if they bore him children. Some concubinary relationships were Irishwomen in their European context (Dublin, 1996), pp 16–42, at p. 16. 8  Donncha Ó Corráin, ‘Women in early Irish society’ in Margaret MacCurtain and Donncha Ó Corráin (eds), Women in Irish society: the historical dimension (Dublin, 1978), pp 1–13, at pp 4–8. 9 Ó Corráin, ‘Marriage in early Ireland’, pp 13–21. 10 Jaski, ‘Marriage laws in Ireland and on the Continent’, pp 27–30.

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formed with women who remained in their own family home, with the man merely visiting his mistress there. Since these relationships too might produce children, they were carefully regulated under the law. The key point was that any children of established paternity were eligible to inherit from their father’s kin, even theoretically to inherit kingship, provided their mothers were not slaves, prostitutes or female satirists.11 It was this difference as regards the inheritance of land and office that enabled the Irish nobility to take a more casual attitude to the canon law on marriage, even after the twelfth-century church reform. No one disputed the letter of church law. Ecclesiastical courts were set up in every diocese, nobles intent on marrying their cousins quite often appealed to the pope for dispensations, at least in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; but they also concluded formal marriages of political significance in the absence of the necessary dispensation, and dismissed their wives without church judgement. They formed concubinary contracts with women of noble birth, with the consent of their kin, in exchange for property handed over or promised as a coibche or ‘bride-price’. The later medieval term for such a contracted concubine was ben choibche, ‘a bride-price woman’, rendered as ‘cayf ’, or ‘choghie’ in Anglo-Irish dialect. As these contracts were not acknowledged by the church in any case, the question of overclose kinship with the lady in question, or the need for valid grounds for her dismissal did not arise, but her children were acknowledged, and she occupied an honourable place in late medieval Gaelic society, even when, as was not unusual, she was the contracted concubine of a cleric bound to celibacy in canon law. The sons of the fourteenth-century Bishop Richard O’Reilly of Kilmore diocese are formally recorded in contemporary genealogies, although Archbishop Sweteman of Armagh complained that the bishop had committed adultery and ‘incest’ with his first cousin Étaín, the daughter of his uncle, and legally the wife of Maguire of Fermanagh, and ‘incest’ with another kinswoman, Étaín Magauran.12 Chieftain’s wives who had been married in church, and later summarily dismissed, might appeal to canon law to order their reinstatement, but the errant husband was perfectly capable of hiring canon lawyers to point out the original marriage had been invalid, because he was too closely akin in some way (in absence of a papal dispensation), or because he had contracted a previous valid church marriage with another wife that had not been formally annulled.13 Thus 11 Kelly, Early Irish law, pp 70–3; Donnchadh Ó Corráin, ‘Women and the law in early Ireland’ in Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wichert (eds), Chattel, servant or citizen: women’s status in church, state and society, Historical Studies XIX (Belfast, 1995), pp 45–57; Nancy Power, ‘Classes of women described in the Senchas Már’ in Binchy (ed.), Studies in early Irish law, pp 81–108; Rudolf Thurneysen, ‘Heirat’, ibid., pp 109–28; Jaski, Early Irish kingship, pp 143–55. 12 Remand & Gillapatraic, Ricard & Piarrus & Áedh, clan Ricard Espuc m. Mailechlainn m. Gilla Ísa Ruaidh [O’Reilly], RIA MS 1233 (23/Q/10), f. 25v; Smith, Reg. Sweteman, nos. 68, 69, 73, 74. See above, p. 311. 13 Katharine Simms, ‘The legal position

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in practice the effects of polygamy were achieved, through both ‘serial polygamy’, with wives married and subsequently divorced, and a plurality of concubines. This is most clearly documented in the O’Donnell genealogical tract, which identifies the individual mothers of the chiefs’ children, naming ten mothers with a total of eighteen sons in the case of King Toirdelbach ‘of the Wine’ O’Donnell (d.1423).14 When one considers that no daughters are included in the count, the fact that, to take only one example, King Rudraige MacMahon of Airgialla (d.1446) is also credited in the genealogies with eighteen or even nineteen sons,15 suggests that he too engaged in a multiplicity of partnerships. This was, of course, common practice for the nobility throughout Europe. King Henry I of England is thought to have fathered twenty-four illegitimate children between sons and daughters,16 but the drowning, in AD1120, of his only legitimate son, William ‘of the White Ship’, precipitated a succession crisis, which would not have been the outcome in Gaelic Ireland. As in other European societies in the early Middle Ages, almost all women were regarded as perpetually ‘under-age’, or subject to a responsible guardian, the father or brother of an unmarried woman, the husband of a married one, the adult sons of a widow or divorcée. The difference in the Irish system, however, was that a woman never completely severed legal ties with her birth kindred, who participated in responsibility for any crimes she might commit, or were conversely entitled to a proportion of the fines that might be awarded for any injury inflicted on her,17 as persons who might be expected to participate in violently avenging her wrongs if no compensation was forthcoming from the wrongdoer. This continuing link with a woman’s birth family was weakest in the case of the formal marriage of a church wife, but may even then have provided some protection against domestic violence from the husband, as is suggested by the tale of Queen Gormlaith, daughter of the high-king Flann Sinna (d.916), contained in the twelfth-century Book of Leinster. This relates that her second husband, the king of Leinster, kicked her off his bed and shamed her in front of her waiting-maids. When her father hesitated to offend the Leinster king, who was his ally, her cousin, Niall Glúndub, king of the North (d.919), saw that she obtained a divorce and full financial settlement, later becoming her third and most-loved husband.18 of Irishwomen in the later Middle Ages’, Irish Jurist, new ser., 10 (1975), 96–111; eadem, ‘Women in Norman Ireland’ in MacCurtain and Ó Corráin (eds), Women in Irish society, pp 14–25 at 16–20; Gillian Kenny, Anglo-Irish and Gaelic women in Ireland, c.1170–1540 (Dublin, 2007), pp 67–84, 102–20. On the terms cayf and choghie see O Corráin, ‘Marriage in early Ireland’, p. 24 note 35 (citing Kenneth Nicholls). 14 Walsh, Beatha Aodha Ruaidh, 2, pp 168–9. See above, Fig. 11. 15 Séamus Pender (ed.), ‘The O Clery Book of Genealogies’, Anal. Hib., 18 (1951), 119; anon., ‘Geinealaighe Fearmanach’, Anal. Hib., 3 (1931), 126. See Kenny, Anglo-Irish and Gaelic women, p. 69. 16 Kathleen Thompson, ‘Affairs of state: the illegitimate children of Henry I’, Journal of Medieval History, 29:2 (2003), 129–151. 17 Kelly, Early Irish law, pp 78–9. 18 R.I. Best, Osborn Bergin and M.A. O’Brien (eds),

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Although the determination to keep hereditary family lands in the male line meant that women could not inherit more than a life-interest in their own father’s patrimony, there was nothing to prevent affectionate fathers from endowing their daughters with moveable property, livestock and valuables, even estates of land they had recently purchased, or lands of other families that they were holding for the time being in pledge for a mortgage, while passing their own hereditary family lands on to their sons.19 Married women or contracted concubines might receive some or all of the ‘bride-price’ into their own hands, and noble wives might receive a confirmatory grant of ‘land of hand and thigh’ from their husbands in the aftermath of the wedding night.20 It was possession of such property that secured the richer wives some independence within marriage, and it was the need to ensure that such property was safely retrieved on the break-up of a marriage, or more informal partnership, that gave a woman’s birth family a continuing interest in her rights and welfare, even in cases where simple affection might be lacking. It is worth noting that the Armagh registers cite a number of examples from county Louth, that part of the diocese where Anglo-Irish common law prevailed, of marriages being arranged between children, or of girls being beaten by their parents to force them into marriage,21 but no such instances are recorded from the Gaelic Irish area. The Brehon laws speak of a girl’s marriage taking place when she has reached the ‘age of choice’, at the end of her fosterage period, at fourteen or seventeen years old, though the ‘choice’ is said to be between marriage and a nunnery.22 The custom of fosterage, by which children were parted from their mothers either in infancy, or from about seven years old, to be reared by another family for payment or ‘affection’, was quite normal in Gaelic society throughout the medieval period, though one also hears of children being reared by their biological parents – for example, in sagas, the foster-brothers of the hero are normally the biological children of his foster-parents.23 Fosterage away from home functioned either as a way of strengthening political ties, between aristocratic families, or for educational purposes, if the child was placed with a cleric, poet or craftsman, or in the case of a fatherless heir, a kinsman might take The Book of Leinster, I (Dublin, 1954), p. 257, lines 7480–501; Eugene O’Curry, Lectures on the manuscript materials of ancient Irish history (Dublin, 1861), pp 131–3. See above, p. 54. 19 Myles Dillon, ‘The relationship of mother and son, of father and daughter and the law of inheritance with regard to women’ in Binchy (ed.), Studies in early Irish law, pp 129–79, at pp 133, 136, 138, 168–9, 174–5, 178. 20 Ibid., pp 139–40, 152, 154; Jaski, ‘Marriage laws in Ireland and on the Continent’, pp 22–5. 21 Katharine Simms, ‘Women in Norman Ireland’, pp 16–17. 22 Kelly, Early Irish law, p. 88; Binchy, Studies in early Irish law, pp 107, 189, 265. 23 E.g., Cúchulainn and Conall Cernach – T.P. Cross and H.C. Slover, Ancient Irish tales (New York, 1936), p. 136. See also Muireann Ní Bhrolcháin, An introduction to early Irish literature (Dublin, 2009), pp 97, 99. A historical example seems recorded in Ann. Conn., pp 88–9 (AD1246).

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over his guardianship until he came of age.24 The custom was not as far removed from practice in the rest of Europe as one might think. Aristocratic families commonly fostered out infants with wet-nurses for the convenience of the lady mother, oblates were received into monasteries as seven-year-olds in the early Middle Ages, as in the case of the Venerable Bede, and aristocratic youths in the high Middle Ages were normally educated in martial arts at the court of some distinguished lord, or in the palace of their king, under the guidance of some lord.25 To this day, some English families may send their sons to board in a preparatory school from the age of seven, and to public school to the age of seventeen or eighteen, often with the motive of encouraging useful social and political ties, a reasoning not far removed from that of the medieval Irish.

THE ROLE OF QUEENS

Queens were the wealthiest women in Gaelic society. To be the married wife (for the time being) of a ruling king was an official position, carrying with it the right to a minor tax, cáin beg or cíos bantiarnain (‘lady’s tribute’), imposed on her husband’s lands, and/or the right to billet her horses, grooms and other servants on his subjects.26 As with the male nobility in Ulster, the queens’ billeted servants were sometimes imposed on church lands, drawing down the wrath of the archbishop of Armagh. In November 1315, Domnall O’Neill, styling himself ‘king of the Irish of Ulster’, his wife Gormlaith, the daughter of O’Donnell, styled ‘queen’ (Latin regina), and their eldest son, John or Seon O’Neill, issued letters patent in their joint names, renouncing their claim to impose tallages or subsidies of any kind on the church lands of Armagh, or to billet Scottish retainers or other troops on church tenants, and vowing to restore any church lands they had seized, especially the estate of Glenaule, and to lodge pledges guaranteeing future payment of compensation for wrongs done against the church.27 The document is dated by the first regnal year of Edward Bruce, ‘by the grace of God, king of Ireland’, and the concessions seem clearly designed to win support for the cause of Bruce’s invasion, perhaps not from the official archbishop of Armagh, Roland de Jorz, who was an adamant opponent of Bruce, but from the disappointed Franciscan candidate for the primacy, Friar Michael MacLaughlin.28 Similarly, in 1454, the elderly Great O’Neill of Tír Eógain, 24 Kühlmann, Die irische Ziehkindschaft, pp 449–52; Hiram Morgan, ‘Lawes of Irelande’, Irish Jurist, 31 (1995–6), 307–13: 312. 25 J.C. Ward, English noblewomen in the later Middle Ages (London and New York, 1992), pp 95–7; Kühlmann, Die irische Ziehkindschaft, pp 47–8, 75, 178; Georges Duby, The chivalrous society, trans. Cynthia Postan (London, 1977), pp 112–22. 26  Simms, ‘The legal position of Irishwomen’, 108. 27  Smith, Reg. Fleming, no. 170. 28  See J.R.S. Phillips, ‘The Remonstrance revisited: England and Ireland in the early fourteenth century’ in T.G. Fraser and K. Jeffery (eds), Men, women and war: papers read before the XXth Irish Conference of Historians, held at Magee College, University of Ulster, 6–8

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Eógan son of Niall Óc (d.1456), was excommunicated by the archbishop along with his then wife, Evelina Baret, and his eldest son and heir, Henry, and many younger sons, for occupying church lands and extorting taxes and services from church tenants, despite earlier promises of amendment. On that occasion, the whole diocese of Armagh was placed under interdict and the matter was not finally settled until August 1455, when Henry O’Neill deposed his elderly father in the presence of Archbishop John Mey, and in November concluded a major concordat with the primate, regulating the relations of church and state in Armagh for the future.29 On these occasions, the queens’ involvement in taxing or imposing billeting on church tenants was in association with their husbands’, but we have some records of queens who used their own financial and even military control independently of their husbands’ wishes. Two spectacular examples both concerned the O’Donnell rulers of Tír Conaill, which became the most heavily militarized region of Ulster. During the Bruce wars (1315–18), King Áed O’Donnell stayed away from Domnall O’Neill’s alliance with Edward Bruce, but took advantage of the confusion in Connacht following the defeat of Earl Richard de Burgh by Bruce in the Battle of Connor (1315) to invade north Sligo. Áed was married to Derbforgaill, daughter of Magnus O’Conor, late king of Connacht (d.1293). Magnus belonged to the Clan Murtagh O’Conors, rather than the main royal line descended from King Cathal Crobderg O’Conor (d.1224), and he had risen to power in association with the Fitzgerald lords of Sligo. When Magnus died, the justiciar of the day, William de Vescy, who hated the Fitzgeralds, replaced Magnus’ brother, King Cathal Rúad O’Conor, with Áed son of Eógan O’Conor (d.1309) from the main royal line. Áed son of Eógan promptly allied with the O’Conors of Sligo, yet another branch of the dynasty, to destroy the Clan Murtagh O’Conors, while Earl Richard de Burgh set about ousting the Fitzgerald lords from Sligo. He succeeded in 1298, when they surrendered their Connacht lands for estates elsewhere in Ireland. After Richard de Burgh’s defeat in 1315, when, say the annals, he was ‘with no power or lordship’ throughout Ireland, the Clan Murtagh engaged in a furious feud with the O’Conors of Sligo for control of the northern district of Carbury Drumcliff. In the course of this struggle two brothers of Derbforgaill, and others of her kinsmen, were killed. The leader of Clan Murtagh, Ruaidri son of Cathal Ruad O’Conor, seizing his opportunity, petitioned Edward Bruce for galloglass troops and had himself inaugurated as king of Connacht. Meanwhile Áed O’Donnell attacked and razed the castle of Sligo. The annals say he June 1991, Historical Studies XVIII (Dublin, 1993), pp 13–27, at p. 20; and above, p. 112. 29 PRONI Register of John Prene III, ff. 1r–6v, 12r–v, 24*v–26r; Katharine Simms, ‘The concordat between Primate John Mey and Henry O’Neill, 1455’, Archivium Hibernicum, 34 (1976/7), 71–82.

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came into Carbury and ravaged the whole district, being advised thereto by his wife, the daughter of Magnus O Conchobair. She herself, with all the gallowglasses and men of the Clan Murtagh that she could obtain, marched against the churches of Drumcliff and plundered many of its clergy.30 This direct military involvement by a woman may seem surprising, but in this year husband and wife were acting in cooperation. However, Áed O’Donnell’s main interest was to enlarge the area of Tír Conaill’s influence, and when, in the course of a second raid against the O’Conors of Sligo the following year, one of their number, Ruaidri son of Domnall O’Conor, deserted his kinsmen and submitted to O’Donnell in exchange for being permitted to rule the district of Carbury as a tributary lord, O’Donnell accepted his submission and made peace. However his wife, Derbforgaill, was determined to continue the feud and avenge her brothers’ deaths. We are told: Derbforgaill daughter of Magnus O Conchobair hired a band of gallowglasses and gave them a reward for killing Ruaidri son of Domnall O Conchobair; so by them he was killed, in violation of oaths sworn to him previously on the relics of Tirconnell. After this the chief families of Carbury were extensively plundered by the Cenel Conaill.31 As it happened, Derbforgaill died later the same year, while her kinsman King Ruaidri son of Cathal Ruad O’Conor was defeated and killed by the leader of the main O’Conor royal line, Feidlim son of Áed son of Eógan. In later years the Clan Murtagh were to lend significant support to Derbforgaill’s son, Conchobar, against other half-brothers claiming succession to the kingship of Tír Conaill (see Fig. 11), but they fought more as mercenary auxiliaries than political allies.32 This example shows that the fourteenth-century Derbforgaill, queen of Tír Conaill, had direct command of military forces which she employed against her husband’s wishes. More striking still is the record of the sixteenth-century Findguala MacDonald, the daughter of the Scottish commander James MacDonald, Lord of Isla and the Glens of Antrim, and wife of the ruler of Tír Conaill, Áed son of Magnus O’Donnell (d.1600). She was known in her own day as ‘Ingen Dub’, ‘dark/black maiden’, an interesting parallel to the common male nom de guerre of ‘Gilla Dub’, ‘dark/black lad’. She brought a ‘dowry’ of Scottish troops to her marriage in 1569 with Áed son of Magnus, and it appears that she continued to exercise authority over how those troops were to be employed after her marriage. This was critical to the question of succession to the chieftainship, 30  Ann. Conn., pp 240–1 (1315); Katharine Simms, ‘A lost tribe – the Clan Murtagh O’Conors’, Galway Archaeological and Historical Society Journal, 53 (2001), 1–22. 31 Ann. Conn., pp 242–3 (1316). 32 Simms, ‘A lost tribe’, 15–19.

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as Áed son of Magnus had a number of sons by earlier unions, far older than the four sons that Ingen Dub bore him, but she was determined to ensure the succession of her own eldest-born, Áed Rúad II, or ‘Red Hugh’. While he was still a child she spread the tale that he was the prophesied Áed son of Áed who would deliver Ireland from the foreigners, as foretold by St Colm Cille, and fostered him out among all the leading noble families of Tír Conaill in what turned out to be an unsuccessful attempt to promote loyalty to his person. The English government saw the youth, when only fourteen years old, as such a significant figure within his own dynasty, that Sir John Perrott had him kidnapped and imprisoned in Dublin Castle for four years from September 1587.33 During Áed Rúad’s imprisonment, the eldest half-brother, Domnall O’Donnell, gathered an army to assert his right to the chieftainship, whereupon Ingen Dub brought a troop of Scottish mercenaries to defeat and kill him along with 200 of his followers at the Battle of Doire Lethan in September 1590.34 Even after Áed Rúad’s escape and return to Tír Conaill in January 1592 an English informant claimed that the eldest surviving half-brother was favoured by the inhabitants of Tír Conaill as the next heir, because his mother was Irish, and they resented the role of the Scottish party supporting the claims of Áed Rúad II.35 This may have been wishful thinking on the part of the English, who were very suspicious of Scottish influence in Ulster at this time. Although she was still opposed by a significant aristocratic faction within Tír Conaill, Ingen Dub’s military strength and determination were sufficient to force through her husband’s resignation from the chieftainship and the inauguration of her son within months of his escape from Dublin Castle, while he was still ill and lame from the effects of frost-bite during the journey and the consequent amputation of both his big toes, as his biographer, Lugaid O’Clery, relates: what he did, contrary to [his physicians’] prohibition, was to send messengers to the Cenél Conaill (to such of them as were obedient to his parents), and to assemble and collect them to the east side of the wellknown mountain, i.e. Bearnas Mor of Tir Aodh. He resolved at last to go himself to meet them, and those that were to the west of the mountain which we have mentioned assembled to him … Those to the east of the mountain who came to the same gathering were O Domhnaill, his own father, Aodh, son of Maghnus, son of Aodh Óg, son of Aodh Ruadh, with his wife, i.e., Inghen Dubh, daughter of James, son of Alexander, son of Eoin Cathanach, mother of Aodh; the daughter of Mac Cailin was her 33 Darren McGettigan, Red Hugh O’Donnell and the Nine Years War (Dublin, 2005), pp 36–42. 34 Ibid., p. 46. 35 Walsh, Beatha Aodha Ruaidh, 2, pp 24–5.

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mother. It was an advantage that she came to the gathering, for she was the head of advice and counsel of the Cenél Conaill, and though she was calm and very deliberate and much praised for her womanly qualities, she had the heart of a hero and the mind of a soldier, inasmuch as she exhorted in every way each one that she was acquainted with, and her husband especially, to avenge his injuries and wrongs on each according to his deserts. She had many troops from Scotland, and some of the Irish at her disposal and under her control, and in her own hire and pay constantly, and especially during the time that her son (the Ruadh) was in prison and confined by the English.36 In the case of Ingen Dub, the normal high status of a chieftain’s wife was inflated by her control of the army of Scots she had brought with her into the marriage, and a similar enhanced role was enjoyed by her step-mother, Agnes Campbell, who in 1569 brought an army of 8,000 Scottish troops with her when she married Toirdelbach Luinech O’Neill, then ruler of Tír Eógain.37 However, we have evidence that Irish queens without private armies could also be found participating in the discussions of the territorial council of nobles, the oirecht. In 1210, Cathal Crobderg O’Conor, king of Connacht, offered to bring his eldest son and heir to meet King John, who had a bad reputation for his treatment of hostages, and the annals say when Cathal reached home: the counsel which he, and his wife, and his people adopted was, not to take the son to the king, although this was the worst counsel (issí comairle do roine féin & a bhen & a mhuinntir, gan an mac do bhreth a g-cenn an rí, ger bhí sin comairle ba messa).38 In 1433, the land forces of Eógan O’Neill, ruler of Tír Eógain, reinforced by the sea-power of the MacDonald Lord of the Isles, invaded Tír Conaill while King Niall Garb II O’Donnell and his army were out of the country. In this emergency leadership passed to the tánaiste or deputy-chief, Niall Garb’s brother Nechtain, but also to Niall’s queen: Nechtain Ua Domnaill and the daughter of Ua Concobuir Faly, that is, the wife of Ua Domnaill and the Tir-Conallian sons of sub-kings also went into conference with them at Inis-Eogain and peace was made between them without permission from Ua Domnaill.39 The annals add that on O’Donnell’s return he ratified the peace with O’Neill. 36 Ibid., 1, pp 36–9. 37 Lennon, Sixteenth-century Ireland, pp 60–1, 275. 38 ALC 1, pp 242–3 (AD1210). On the oirecht see Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 60–5. 39 AU 3, pp 126–7 (AD1433). See above, p. 170.

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The fact that fathers principally endowed their daughters with moveable wealth rather than land meant that when a family needed to ransom a prisoner, wives and mothers were particularly well-equipped with cash and livestock to do so. Having considerable control over their own property within marriage, queens could even embark on a ransom negotiation independently, as when we are told that in 1445 Margaret, daughter of O’Carroll, and wife of Calbach O’Connor Faly, lord of Offaly, returned all English prisoners of war captured by her husband in that year in order to obtain the release of the son of Mageoghegan, chief of Cenél Fiachach, who was a hostage in English hands, ‘and that vnadvised to Calwagh [her husband]’, that is, without consulting him first.40 She had just returned from a pilgrimage to St James of Compostella in Spain, undertaken in company with a number of other Irish nobles, including Mageoghegan, and may have felt a particular loyalty to him as a fellow pilgrim. Naturally in the case of most hostage negotiations, or the ransoming of prisoners, one would expect both king and queen to share the same objectives. This is probably what lay behind a safe-conduct issued in March 1393 to Úna wife of Niall Óc O’Neill to come to Drogheda, with twelve men and women in her train, to have colloquy and treat with the king’s council in Ireland and with James Butler, 3rd earl of Ormond, then justiciar.41 The context makes clear the subject of her discussions. In 1389, Niall Óc O’Neill had been captured by Edmund de Londres, the constable of Carlingford, to the delight of the supporters of the underage Roger de Mortimer, earl of March and Ulster, whose lands in east Ulster and north Louth had been ravaged by O’Neill’s attacks. However the justiciar of the day, Sir John Stanley, released Niall Óc the following year as part of a peace treaty with his father, Niall Mór, and his sons, in which they promised allegiance to the English king and the earl of March for the future and handed over Niall Óc’s eldest son and heir, Brian, and two nephews, the second sons of his brothers, Henry Aimréid and Cú Ulad Rúad O’Neill, as hostages. This release of Niall Óc caused fury among the Mortimer party, understandably, since after his release Niall Óc led a raid on Dundalk in 1392 in which Sir Geoffrey White, one of the keepers of the peace for county Louth, was killed, tradition says in single combat with Niall Óc himself.42 Had Niall Óc come in person to parley in the spring of 1393, there is every chance he would have been re-captured. As it happened, Queen Úna’s negotiations were triumphantly successful. Her son Brian was released immediately in exchange, according to the Mortimer party, for one thousand cows and ten hostages of little or no 40 Ann. MacFirb., p. 212 (AD1445). On the career of this lady, see Elizabeth FitzPatrick, ‘Mairgréag an-Einigh Ó Cearbhaill: “The best of the women of the Gaedhil”’, Journal of the Kildare Archaeological and Historical Society, 18 (1992), 20–38. 41 James Graves (ed.), A roll of the proceedings of the king’s council in Ireland (London, 1877), p. 191. See above, p. 138. 42 Ann. Conn., pp 364–5 (AD1392); Rot. Canc. Hib., p. 147, no. 242 (Patent Roll, 13 Ric. II); Ó Donnchadha, Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe, pp 33–4. 43 London, PRO SC 8/189/9434. I owe this reference, with many thanks, to Dr Dorothy Johnston.

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Fig. 35 Open-air feast presided over by MacSweeney of Fanad and his wife, with poet and harpist. The two figures on the extreme right are probably professional farters, see below, p. 471. From John Derricke’s The image of Irelande (1581).

value.43 However one of these hostages was another son of Niall Óc, Feidlimid, and when this youth was later handed over into the keeping of Mortimer himself, Niall Óc expressed considerable concern for his welfare.44 We have no way of knowing whether Feidlimid was also a son of Queen Úna. Earlier, in 1376, the wife of Niall Mór is found participating in her husband’s negotiations, this time with Archbishop Milo Sweteman. Niall Mór and his wife came to the archbishop’s manor ‘beside the lake’ near Armagh to inform him that his cathedral chapter had risen in revolt against him, and to take their gospel oaths to defend him against his rebel clergy. Relying on this oath, Milo delegated O’Neill to collect the rents from his church lands, but when O’Neill then refused to hand them over, he appealed to his son, presumably Niall Óc, to use his influence with his father.45 The wife’s name is not given in the archbishop’s letter, but she was most probably Ben Mide (d.1385), daughter of MacMahon of Airgialla, and mother of Niall Óc himself.46 Another more domestic duty of queens was to preside over the feasts at court, to defuse incipient quarrels among the guests, to present the gifts and rewards to poets and others (see Fig. 35). 44 Curtis, Richard II, pp 134, 214. 45 Smith, Reg. Sweteman, pp 9–11 (no. 7); see above, pp 312–13. 46 Ann. Conn., pp 354–5 (AD1385); Aith., no. 15, verse 20.

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A late enumeration of queenly duties comes in a poem of reproof addressed by the poet-historian Tadc mac Daire (fl. 1602) to Síle, apparently the wife of MacWilliam, who had annoyed the poet by contradicting his account of her genealogy: Everyone is blind in his neighbour’s art; ’twas foolish of thee to strive with me in history … I could not compete with thee in any queenly deed which would match thy fair manners … I am unequal to thee – naturally – in majesty of gait, in gentle rare-spoken voice, or, in reconciling nobles. In giving many goodly gifts, in steadiness of purpose, in fair sure-footed queenly form, in noble courteous speech.47 The idea that queens acted as peacemakers between their husband’s quarrelsome subjects was so taken for granted that the poet Tadc Dall Ó hUicinn even credited the warlike Ingen Dub with this function, in spite of the fact that she was not only seen as a divisive figure by English observers, but her son’s biographer assured us: ‘she exhorted in every way each one that she was acquainted with, and her husband especially, to avenge his injuries and wrongs on each according to his deserts’.48 Tadc Dall, however, blandly assures us: In any province where that woman is, none dare to talk of strife … the race of Dálach [the O’Donnells] on account of the queen of Cobha’s pure plain, do not remember in their hearts the offences of others.49 Queens are more frequently praised by the poets for piety and religious observance than are their husbands, and also for drinking more moderately, where kings were praised for drinking deep. For example it was sung of Tomás Óc Maguire, king of Fermanagh: If Tomás’s son comes from his house to the harbour-side to drink wine, he does not think he has had sufficient, though he drink all the wine in the harbour!50 Whereas another poet wrote of his fellow pilgrim, the well-known lady, Margaret daughter of O’Carroll:

47 Aithd., no. 41, verses 10, 11, 13, 14. 48 Above, p. 445. 49 Knott, Tadhg Dall, no. 2, verses 56, 58. My square brackets. Tadc Dall had also addressed a fiery exhortation to the rival candidate for kingship, Conn son of the Calbach O’Donnell (d. 1583), ibid., no. 1, so the reference to O’Donnells burying the hatchet may have been in support of this patron. 50 Simms, ‘Medieval Fermanagh’ in Fermanagh Hist. & Soc., pp 77–103, at p. 97.

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Margaret’s fame has established her protection … a lady … whose fosterer is Jesus; heart bountiful and pious. To drink feasts she never forsook her prayers – a woman who lives by rule.51 Tadc Óc Ó hUicinn wrote of Margaret’s contemporary, Órlaid the daughter of O’Kelly: A twofold burden she will assume To please God and to please man Generosity and striving after holiness are the two passions of this lady of the curling hair… This … daughter of Ó Ceallaigh of Cláire after her Friday’s fast tastes no food Till the feast-day (Sunday) dawns.52 We have already seen in the case of Ingen Dub that the ideals of womanhood depicted by poets do not always correspond with the behaviour of actual women, and the travel-writer Fynes Moryson, secretary to Lord Mountjoy, 1600–3, questioned whether Irishwomen could be said to drink less than the men: the wives of Irish lords … often drink till they be drunken, or at least till they void urine in full assemblies of men. I cannot, though unwilling, but note the Irish women more specially with this fault, which I have observed in no other part to be a woman’s vice, but only in Bohemia. Yet, so accusing them, I mean not to excuse the men, and will also confess that I have seen virgins, as well gentlewomen as citizens, commanded by their mothers to retire after they had in courtesy pledged one or two healths.53 The distinction Moryson noted between the behaviour expected from young single women, and married women accompanied by their husbands, is already suggested in the Old Irish law tracts. Early Irish jurists recognized rape as a crime not only when accompanied by force, but when advantage was taken of an unconscious (usually drunk) woman to engage in sexual intercourse without her consent, but no compensation was given to a married woman who went into an ale-house alone, ‘because it was wrong for her to be in the [ale] house without her husband to protect her’.54 Presumably this reservation applied a fortiori to a young single woman. Unsurprisingly queens were expected to set a good example and to keep their ladies-in-waiting in order. It was said of Sadb (d.1373), daughter of King Cathal O’Conor and wife of the chief Niall Magauran, lord of Tellach Echach (barony of Tullyhaw, county Cavan): 51 Bergin, IBP, p. 285. See above, p. 446. 52 Aithd., no. 11, verses 4, 6, 7. under Eliz. & Jas I, pp 425–6. 54 Kelly, Early Irish law, p. 135.

53 Morley, Ire.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages Her glory is ever – ’tis part of her blessedness – a defence for women and a check to ill-deeds; her fame and power of intercession Are ever saving women from troubles. She has this said of her – how many are there of whom it can not be said that no lady surpasses her and that she surpasses them all she is secure from fleshly sins, The weight of her prayers outbalances them.55

Another poem to the same chieftainess remarks: the daughter of the king of Ath Blair is mistress of all her women; (as bhanchodhnach don bhandáil) when this Pillar of Colt chides a maid ’twould be hard to find excuse for the maid against her.56 This brings us to the subject of the court ladies.

C O U RT L A D I E S

Since medieval European courts did not usually make use of eunuchs to chaperon and protect their queens and princesses, these roles devolved on women, and women being the weaker sex, it was felt there was ‘safety in numbers’. Every noblewoman was constantly attended by a bevy of ladies-inwaiting, and Gaelic Irish society was no different. Poets refer to the presence of court ladies as one of the main attractions of visiting a king’s house. A poem to Donnchad O’Brien, 4th earl of Thomond, speaks fondly of: women attending to their gold embroidery who utter only soft words going to the house of the womenfolk of the Í Bhriain Is not a wondrous mist [ní ciaigh alltachta] for a man of knowledge57 Tadc Dall Ó hUicinn recalled a visit to Cúchonnacht Maguire in the castle of Enniskillen:

55  McKenna, Book of Magauran, p. 325 (no. 13, verses 5–6). 56  Ibid., p. 339 (no. 16, verse 36). 57 Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail, ‘A poem addressed to Donnchadh Ó Briain, 4th earl of Thomond’ in J. Carey, M. Herbert and K. Murray (eds), Cín Chille Cúile: texts, saints and places, essays in honour of Pádraig Ó Riain (Aberystwyth, 2004), pp 193–207, at p. 205. Presumably the implication is that the way to the women’s quarters is a familiar path for the

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I found, moreover, throughout the fortress plenty of poets and minstrels … plenty of slender-lipped, satin-clad maidens, weaving wondrous gold fringes.58 There are few indications of how many ladies would normally surround a queen. Gofraid Finn Ó Dálaig wrote of Sadb daughter of Domnall Óc MacCarthy (d.1391), and probable wife of an O’Brien king: this queen hath won great glory . and exalted the glory of good women with her two or three hundred ladies . no wonder she is high of spirit.59 If this has any relation to reality, it is presumably a joking compliment with reference to the total number of women attending a royal feast over which the queen would naturally preside, such as Christmas, or even her own wedding feast. The surviving household accounts of the Lady Elizabeth de Burgh, mother of the Brown Earl of Ulster, record that her immediate entourage consisted of seven ladies, four chambermaids and a laundress,60 and this seems much more in proportion with the entourage of ‘twelve men and women’ who were to attend Úna, the wife of Niall Óc O’Neill, on her way to parley with the justiciar in 1393.61 By chance we have another eye-witness account of Queen Úna and her female entourage in the narrative of the pilgrim, Ramon de Perellós, who attended a Christmas feast as the guest of Niall Óc O’Neill in 1397, and described among other things the clothing of the Irish: All the principal ones [among them] wear frieze cloaks and both the women and the men show their shameful parts without any shame. The poor people go totally naked, although the majority wear those cloaks, [whether they be in] good or bad [condition]. Thus were the ladies dressed. The queen, her daughter and her sister were dressed and girded, but the queen was barefoot and her handmaidens, twenty in number, were dressed as I have told you above, with their shameful parts showing. And you should know that all those people were no more ashamed of this than of showing their faces.62 Ramon’s distinction between poor people going ‘totally naked’ under a worn frieze cloak, and others who showed shameful parts without shame, but were apparently not ‘totally naked’, may indicate that many of the women went poet, as opposed to his being led astray. 58  Knott, Tadhg Dall, no. 11, verses 15–16. 59 ‘Fuair an ríoghain-se robhladh . do fhíoraidhbhsigh uaill ndeaghbhan; / sí céad nó dá chéad fionnbhan . ní hiongnadh dhí méad meanman’. Lambert McKenna, ‘The historical poems of Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh V’, Irish Monthly, 47:550 (Apr. 1919), 224–8: 226–7; DiD, no. 99, verse 28. 60 J.C. Ward, English noblewomen in the later Middle Ages (London and New York, 1992), p. 53. 61  See above, p. 446. 62  Carpenter, ‘The pilgrim from

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topless, though wearing skirts, as appears to be the case in a sketch by Lucas de Heere in the early sixteenth century (see Plate XVI). The queen’s bare feet are consistent with de Perellós earlier observation that all the bishops and lords, and O’Neill himself were also barefoot at the Christmas feast, and seems to be an accurate detail, but as mentioned above, represented a passing fashion, related to imitation of a perceived heroic culture.63 Fashions were changing, however. In the course of the fifteenth century the production of linen became an important cottage industry in Ireland.64 By the early sixteenth century, long, saffron-dyed linen shirts extending from the neck to the ankles were common, as we learn from the account of a later pilgrim to St Patrick’s Purgatory, the papal nuncio Bishop Francesco Chiericati, who visited Ulster in 1517, and described his experience in a letter to Isabella d’Este Gonzaga: The clothing of the men is a woven saffron shirt from the feet to the neck, shoes without heels, a cloak over it of a gay colour, a felt hat on the head, no other kind being used: they are all shaved except on the chin. The women are very beautiful and very fair, but slovenly. They wear the same saffroned shirts, with a red coif on the head à la carmagnola.65 Turning from how the court ladies were dressed, to how they passed their time – their most obvious duty was to tend their mistress, the queen, or her daughters, and there are a number of bardic poems that show them at work. The finest is addressed by the eminent Tadc Mór Ó hUicinn to Findguala (d.1310), daughter of King Magnus O’Conor, and sister to the warlike queen Derbforgaill, wife of Áed O’Donnell, referred to above.66 In the poem, Slán fat fholchadh, a Fhionnghuala, somewhat infelicitously rendered by Fr Lambert McKenna as ‘Hail to thy toilet [lit. ‘bathing’], O Fionnghuala’, the poet lingeringly and sensuously describes the princess’s hair being washed, combed and plaited, then praises her brows, eyelashes, face, snowy bosom, and side, rounded knees, calves and slender feet.67 His composition became a classic, cited in the bardic grammatical tracts.68 In the next generation, perhaps in deliberate imitation, Sadb daughter of King Cathal (d.1324) son of Domnall O’Conor, of the rival Sligo branch of the O’Conor dynasty, the wife of Niall Magauran, commissioned Catalonia’, pp 99–119, at p. 110. 63 Above, p. 427 and see Simms, ‘The barefoot kings’. 64 See Timothy O’Neill, Merchants and mariners in medieval Ireland (Dublin, 1987), pp 67– 8. Linen is listed among the chief exports of Ireland in the poem ‘Libel of English Policy’ (c.AD1436–7) – Thomas Wright (ed.), Political poems and songs relating to English history, 2 (London, 1861), p. 186. 65 J.P. Mahaffy, ‘Two early tours of Ireland’, Hermathena, 40 (1914), 1–19: 14. 66 Above, p. 443. 67 Lambert McKenna, ‘Poem to Fionnghuala, daughter of Maghnus Ó Conchobhair’, Irish Monthly, 48:561 (Mar. 1920), 163–7. My square brackets. See also DiD, no. 114. 68 Damian McManus, ‘The Irish grammatical and syntactical tracts: a concordance of duplicated and identified citations’, Ériu, 48 (1997), 83–101: 97, no. 112.

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a similar but more pedestrian composition by the less eminent poet Niall Ó hUicinn, which gives the maids a more prominent role: A line of kneeling maids . do the toilet of the fair blue-eyed girl her hair is washed as she wears a red robe . and sits with her back to the maids Whenever at her toilet . her tresses are displayed the ladies of her train feel jealous . of that soft braided hair with its foaming furrows When her mass of hair is set loose . from her fresh smooth curly head her white side cannot be seen for it . even her knees cannot be seen Far out from her are the ends of her tresses . when held by the ladies of this princess of Cuala when it is in the arms of tiring-maids . it is seen to be faultless The ornamented girdle with four buckles . fits close to her shapely form she likes not to have on her bright waist . a belt with only one opening Bright-shining scarlet cloak is made for her . and coloured satin garments clothe her twisted gold threads adorn . the robe of the queen from the Bóinn of Breagha.69 In view of Ramon de Perellós’ dismissive account of the dress of the ladies in O’Neill’s court, one might be forgiven for thinking that the satin tunic and goldembroidered robe of this queen were figments of the poet’s imagination. However the town council of Drogheda imposed a murage tax for the upkeep of the town walls in 1296, and again in 1317, on a range of goods sold in the town that included ‘cloth of silk with gold’, and ‘cloth of silk without gold’,70 so the queen could have had access to such luxuries. Niall Magauran, the chief of a single tuath (Tellach Echach, approx. the barony of Tullyhaw, county Cavan), had married above his station in gaining Sadb, daughter of the titular king of Connacht,71 and this probably explains why so many of the poems in the Magauran poem-book are addressed to his wife, or to him and his wife jointly, and this may also reflect the amount of wealth Sadb had brought to the marriage. Indeed, the poem praising Sadb’s gold-embroidered robe was originally composed for her while married to an earlier husband, the more powerful O’Rourke of Breifne. Arguably the embroidery Lucas de Heere depicts on the 69 McKenna, Book of Magauran, no. 16, verses 3, 6, 8, 19, 26, 32. 70 See CDI, 1293–1301, pp 145–6; J.T. Gilbert (ed.), Historical and municipal documents of Ireland, 1172–1320 (London, 1870), p. 415. For full transcripts, with translation and commentary of the surviving records of medieval Drogheda I am indebted to the research of Dr Chiara Buldorini, ‘Drogheda as a case-study of Anglo-Norman town foundation in Ireland, 1194–1412’ (PhD, 2 vols, TCD, 2009) 2, pp 65, 70, 81, 84. 71 See McKenna, Book of Magauran, p. ix.

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green jacket of a galloglass (see Plate XVI) could be interpreted as made with gold thread. Embroidery is represented as an important and continuous occupation of the queen and her ladies, most often with reference to the embroidering of strips or ‘borders’ (enga), and battle-standards. As long ago as the early eighth century, ‘borders’ are listed among the grounds for a woman’s legal claim, after two days notice, for ‘the price of the produce of the hand, for wages’.72 It would appear that plain wool or linen tunics were given added value and nobility by sewing strips of embroidery around the cuffs and hems, and these could then be distributed as ceremonial gifts to poets or other favoured courtiers. The embroidered figures are said to be of animals and birds. In further poems to Sadb wife of Magauran, we are told: This Swan of the Leamhain . depicts lion and dragon and steeds on her satin cloth adding on its border . herds of oxen fleeing before a wolf in gold73 The silent bird thou depictest . is lovely to see, O Sadhbh and many herds find place on the neat border . of embroidered cloth which thou hast in hand.74 Another Sadb, daughter of Domnall MacCarthy, seems to have embroidered deer on her borders, according to the celebrated Munster poet, Gofraid Finn Ó Dálaig (d.1387): a drove ever in antler-chains(?) . has Sadhbh’s hand, fair as apple-bloom wrought on the edge of her graceful mantle(?) . the herd has room on the border.75 Gráinne wife of Domnall MacSweeney, chief of Fanad, and constable of Tír Conaill (the lady portrayed in Fig. 35 above), was a MacSweeney by birth as well as by marriage, and true to the warlike tradition of her family, is apparently shown embroidering her husband’s battle-standard: A crowd of fair women who gave rise to envy(?) surround her till noon. Beautiful trees seen in the sewing, Gráinne embroiders them with golden birds … Hard to chronicle after you every tale in your [Domnall’s] satin banners, flightless birds in the sewing, designed by you(?) with golden wings.76 72 Anc. Laws Ire., 1, pp 150–1; CIH, 2, p. 379. 73 McKenna, Book of Magauran, no. 13, verse 25. 74 Ibid., no. 17, verse 21. 75 Táin do ghnáth i nglas chongna . [Do láidh] bas mar bhláth n-abhla . Do thuill fan eing an ealbha . [ar chuirr] sheagla sheing Shadhbha’. Lambert McKenna, ‘The historical poems of Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh V’, Irish Monthly, 47:550 (Apr. 1919), 224–8: 225. 76 ‘Bró fhionnban da tánaic tnuidh . ‘na timchal go tanaic nóin . croinn

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It is hard to imagine how such fine work could have been carried out by guttering candlelight in the windowless feasting-halls described in thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century poems,77 and indeed saga literature depicts womenfolk working in what is called a grénán, later grianán or ‘solar’, which is associated with senester, an early word for ‘window’, though whether the structure in question was an airy upper room, an open-sided verandah, or a free-standing bower seems unclear,78 and perhaps varied as architectural modes developed. Windows that open and shut are expressly noted as one of the merits of Rudraige MacMahon’s timber palace in the mid-fifteenth century,79 and most fifteenth and sixteenthcentury tower houses had noticeably larger windows in the upper storeys.80 However, poets do not merely describe ladies as endlessly sitting around in sewing circles. Niall Ó hUicinn, in the same poem that described the maids washing the hair of Sadb, wife of Magauran, added: Many are the ladies of the princess of fair Luimneach in her castles, every lake is full of the ladies swimming Near her beautiful mansion.81 A poem addressed to the contemporary chief William O’Kelly (d.1381) of Uí Maine in east Galway, on the shores of the Shannon, spoke admiringly of the many plump ladies swimming sidestroke on the waves by his stronghold,82 presumably specifying sidestroke, as giving onlookers a better view. Interestingly when in 1418 Richard O’Reilly, the king of east Breifne [county Cavan], was drowned in a boating accident on Lough Sheelin, along with Eogan ‘his young active wellbeloved son’, and a number of others, we are told that Findguala, O’Reilly’s wife, escaped ‘by virtue of her swimming’.83 Of Sadb, the wealthy wife of Magauran, the poet said: ‘She can turn the helm at the end of a boat, and can send her horse along at a gallop’, even, apparently, while pregnant.84 áille ar fheghain san uaim . Gráinne ga n-uaim dh’énaib óir… Decair a dhenaim ad diaigh . gac énsdair at engaibh sróil . ealta gan etil san úaim . benta uaib go n-etibh óir’. See Katharine Simms, ‘Images of the galloglass in poems to the MacSweeneys’ in Duffy (ed.), The world of the galloglass, pp 106–23, at p. 118. 77  Katharine Simms, ‘Native sources for Gaelic settlement: the house poems’ in Patrick J. Duffy, David Edwards and Elizabeth FitzPatrick (eds), Gaelic Ireland: land, lordship and settlement c.1250–c.1650 (Dublin, 2001), pp 246–67, at pp 250–2. Aed O’Conor’s ‘foreign’ moated grange at Cloonfree is described as ‘windowed’, ‘fuinneogach’ (DiD, no. 119, verse 16) but the remark that when the doors are shut it is sufficiently lighted by the company’s jewels does not inspire confidence in the light thus provided– An tú arís a raith Teamhrach?, verse 30, ed. E.C. Quiggin, ‘O’Conor’s house at Cloonfree’ in E.C. Quiggin (ed.), Essays presented to William Ridgeway (Cambridge, 1913), pp 333–52. 78  RIA Dictionary, s.v. ‘gríanán’. 79  Simms, ‘Native sources’, pp 253–4. 80 H.G. Leask, Irish castles and castellated houses (Dundalk, 1977), pp 81–2. 81 McKenna, Book of Magauran, no. 16, verse 34. 82 ‘Um dún Í Cairpri as cruinn sál . ni tearc mná troma ag taebsnámh mná ar tuinn ag taeb[sh]námh gan toct .’sa druim braenbán on bantroct.’ Táth aoinfhir ar iath Maineach, ABM, no. 457, p. 640, verse 21. 83 Ann. Conn., pp 436–9; AU 3, pp 76–7 (AD1418). 84 McKenna, Book of Magauran, no. 13, verse 29.

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The contrast between aristocratic ladies and those of lower class is highlighted in the medieval legal commentaries appended to an early tract on fosterage, which define appropriate education for young girls as cutting, sewing and embroidery for the daughters of nobles, while the daughters of the lowest free grade, the ócaire, whose herds were reckoned by sevens (7 cows, 7 sheep etc.), were to be taught grinding corn, sieving and kneading, and herding lambs and kids.85 Grinding corn, sieving and kneading were regarded in the early period as tasks particularly allotted to female slaves, and the early tenth-century glossary of Bishop Cormac mac Cuilennáin points out that in his day the watermill had replaced the female slave in this regard, though slaves themselves remained a part of Irish society to the twelfth century.86 However, unless one was wealthy enough to own or part-own a mill oneself, the use of watermills, or horsepowered mills, came at a cost, since the professional miller, whether working on his own behalf or for a lord or ecclesiastical foundation, generated a handsome income.87 Hand-querns continued to be used by many to the end of the sixteenth century, when the travel-writer Fynes Moryson claims that even in the city of Cork: ‘I have seen with these eyes young maids stark naked grinding of corn with certain stones to make cakes thereof ’.88 The advantage of working naked was that, in addition to the back-breaking labour involved, another disagreeable aspect of the task was that the dust and chaff flew everywhere and became lodged in one’s clothes. Baking bread was also part of a housewife’s duty – the Middle Irish anecdote, ‘The Quarrel about the Loaf ’, shows a well-to-do female tenant (banbiatach) of the king of Leinster – ‘baking for the ploughmen’ in harvest-time. While the introductory passage states impersonally that baking was going on in the house when a quarrelsome servant of the king of Munster turned up, his aggressive demand, ‘Woman make that loaf better than you made the loaf a while ago’,89 shows the householder herself was engaged in the work. It has been pointed out that as is frequently the case nowadays, cooks in prestigious locations such as a king’s court tended to be male, while in ordinary households cooking was a woman’s task.90 However the legal references to loaves of ‘man’s baking’ (ferfhuine) and ‘woman’s baking’ (‘banfhuine’) can be misleading, conjuring up images of a contrast between shop-bought pan loaves and home-made soda farls. 85 Kathleen Mulchrone, ‘The rights and duties of women with regard to the education of their children’ in Binchy (ed.), Studies in early Irish law, pp 187–205, at p. 190; Ute Kühlmann, Die irische Ziehkindschaft, pp 147–8. 86  Fergus Kelly, Early Irish farming (Dublin, 1997), pp 439, 482. 87 Ibid., pp 450, 484; Muiris Ó Raghallaigh, ‘Milling and grain-drying, two aspects of cereal processing in early medieval Ireland: a study of archaeological evidence and Old Irish documentary sources’ (M.Phil., TCD, 2005), pp 57–8. 88 Morley, Ire. under Eliz. & Jas I, p. 425. 89 T.P. O’Nowlan (ed.), ‘The Quarrel about the Loaf ’, Ériu, 1 (1904), 128–37: 135. 90 Kelly, Early Irish farming, p. 322.

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Apart from the fact that baking soda was a New World invention, only introduced to Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the distinction between ‘man’s baking’ and ‘woman’s baking’ appears to be a reference to the size of the loaf, not who baked it, as women when claiming hospitality were entitled to loaves only half the size of a standard loaf, in the same way that their honour-price was only half that of their husband’s.91 Law texts and literature also point to clothing as part of the housewife’s responsibility, from keeping and shearing sheep, carding and spinning wool, beating flax, weaving and dying cloth, and growing woad for the dyes.92 Care of the dairy, churning butter and making cheese were also particularly associated with women. It even appears that apart from the stricter monastic communities, it was considered shameful for a man to milk a cow.93 The Second Life of Máedóc of Ferns also describes women going down to the river to wash clothes, laying the clothes on flat stones in the river and stamping on them, holding their skirts so high as to offend the saint.94 It seems as if dyeing cloth also involved stamping on the cloths in troughs of dye with lifted skirts, since in the Life of Ciarán of Clonmacnoise it is held improper for men to be present in a house where cloth was being dyed.95 However, women were not confined to work at home – they might also earn a living in a variety of professions and commercial enterprises. They could be employed as domestic servants (banamuis) in larger households, rising to the rank of female stewards or head-waitresses (banrechtairi).96 They might work as professional embroideresses, either attached to a great household – for example,  the household of St Patrick was traditionally credited with three embroideresses97 – or working freelance by contract, as implied by the short legal delay set for them to observe when suing customers for payment.98 Other women were professional weavers. The annals record the death in 1391 of Seaán Mór O’Conor, known as mac Meic na Banfidigide (‘son of the weaving-woman’s son’).99 Conall Mageoghagan, the seventeenth-century compiler and translator of the Annals of Clonmacnoise, adds somewhat surprisingly ‘which of all trades is of greatest reproach amongst the Irishrye, espetially the sons and husbands of such tradeswomen, and therefore Shane Mor was nicknamed the weauingwoman’s sone’,100 but he may have been merely trying to suggest from 91 Ibid., pp 330, 351. The size of a woman’s loaf is given as ‘two fists broad [i.e., in diameter], and one fist thick’ – see Regina Sexton, ‘Porridges, gruels and bread: the cereal foodstuffs of early medieval Ireland’ in M.A. Monk and John Sheehan (eds), Early medieval Munster: archaeology, history and society (Cork, 1998), pp 76–86, at p. 79. 92 Kelly, Early Irish farming, pp 141–2, 264–70, 449. 93 A.T. Lucas, Cattle in ancient Ireland (Kilkenny, 1989), pp 42–3. 94 Plummer, Bethada Náem nÉrenn, 1, pp 217–18 , 2, p. 211. 95 Whitley Stokes (ed.), Lives of saints from the Book of Lismore (Oxford, 1890), pp 121, 266; Kelly, Early Irish farming, pp 449–50. 96 Kelly, Early Irish law, p. 85; Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 80–1. 97 AFM 1, pp 138–9 (AD448). 98 Anc. Laws Ire., 1, pp 150–1; CIH, 2, p. 379. See above, p. 454. 99 Ann. Conn., pp 362–3 (AD1391). 100 Ann. Clonm., pp 314–15 (AD1391).

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aristocratic prejudice that the nickname was a gratuitous insult rather than a genuine record of the lowly origins of the mother of an O’Conor prince. A sixteenth-century crosántacht has a comic anecdote about a hag of MacDermot’s household called Coblach, who accidentally caused the monks of Mag Luirg to break their fast during Lent, by selling them a jar of potted meat she had prepared for Easter, instead of the butter they had requested.101 The fact that she could confuse the jars suggests she had a number of both kinds for sale. To entertain guests at feasts there were strolling female singers of ballads (abráin),102 and more frequently mentioned were the professional keening women, whose ‘feigned grief ’ the poets contrast with their own allegedly more heartfelt lamentation.103 Lastly there were female satirists (bancháinti), and the mná siúil, the ‘walking women’ or wandering prostitutes, described by Edmund Spenser.104 It would appear that female satirists shared a reputation for promiscuity with the prostitutes, since the law denied their sons the right to inherit property or chieftainship from the fathers, not on the grounds of illegitimacy alone, for many other illegitimate sons were admitted to full or partial inheritance, but because of their low status and probably the doubtful paternity of their offspring.105 Low status did not equate with social ostracism. Prostitutes were part of a much wider group of low-status entertainers who wandered from fair to fair and from feast to feast, claiming and receiving hospitality. A bardic poem in amhrán metre addressed to Edmund Butler, Viscount Mountgarret (d.1602), which praises him as the ‘face which refuses no human being’, ends with two verses in  compliment to his wife, Gráinne, daughter of Barnaby Fitzpatrick (MacGillaphátraic), baron of Upper Ossory. In it she is said to be courted by harpers, poets, conjurers and bards, paying clerics and naked prostitutes alike.106 Clearly the poet, who has already praised Edmund for his liberality to poets, reserves the reference to prostitutes to the verses addressed to his wife to ensure the audience realizes that the payments are purely charitable. Travelling entertainers and travelling craftsmen, or in some cases craftswomen, were a prominent and essential part of the society of Gaelic Ireland. Their functions arose naturally out of the settlement patterns of the society itself, as will be discussed in the following chapter.

101 From ‘Foghmhar na bhfileadh fuil Bhrianach’ (ABM, no. 242, p. 326). 102 McKenna, Book of Magauran, no. xxvii, verse 3. 103 See Katharine Simms, ‘The poet as chieftain’s widow: bardic elegies’ in Ó Corráin, Breatnach and McCone (eds), Sages, saints and storytellers, pp 400–11, at p. 402; Julie Le Blanc, ‘Lamentations of the past: an echo of the medieval Irish keening women’ (M.Phil., TCD, no. 6280, 2001). 104 Spenser, A view, p. 58. 105 Nancy Power, ‘Classes of women described in the Senchus Már’ in Binchy (ed.), Studies in early Irish law, pp 81–108, at pp 105–6; Kelly, Early Irish law, pp 102–3; Anc. Laws Ire., 5, pp 176–7, 452–9; CIH, 1, pp 15, 232–3. See above, p. 438. 106 ‘re díol méirdreach bhíos go taobhnocht tónluaimneach’ – Carney, Poems on the Butlers, p. 100.

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CHAPTER

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The life of the people: popular assemblies, farming, houses, clothing and food

T H E D I S P E R S E D PAT T E R N O F S E T T L E M E N T

Many of the observations made by modern scholars and sixteenth-century English observers about the nature of society and settlement in Gaelic Ireland apply with added strength to the province of Ulster. Professor Barry has argued that while there is general consensus that the settlement pattern in pre-twelfthcentury Ireland was dispersed, apart from Viking ports and the larger church settlements, this changed with the advent of the Anglo-Norman colonists in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Not only were the Viking sea-ports developed into substantial towns and cities, but the Anglo-Norman lords founded a network of small towns and villages wherever they brought followers to settle on their estates. He points out, however, that this pattern was reversed to some degree by the famines and plagues of the fourteenth century, and the shrinking area of English royal power in Ireland, resulting in many deserted villages, with settlement, even in areas under baronial control, being focussed on the dispersed pattern of tower houses.1 In mid- and western Ulster, however, no Viking sea-ports became established, and the few Anglo-Norman nucleated settlements founded west of the river Bann were destroyed in the uprising that followed the murder of the ‘Brown Earl’ of Ulster, William de Burgh, in 1333.2 The population lived dispersed, in the case of the landowning class on individual farms, as Sir John Davies noted with respect to Fermanagh ‘as their septs or families did multiply, their possessions have been from time to time divided and sub-divided, and broken into so many parcels as almost every acre of land hath a several owner, which termeth himself a lord, and his portion of land his country’.3 Some of the tenantry, or ‘poor husbandmen’, seem to have lived in small clusters, pooling their resources to plough and harvest their allotted portions of 1 T.B. Barry, ‘“The people of the country … dwell scattered”: the pattern of rural settlement in Ireland in the later Middle Ages’ in John Bradley (ed.), Settlement and society in medieval Ireland: studies presented to Francis Xavier Martin OSA (Kilkenny, 1988), pp 345–60; idem, ‘Rural settlement in medieval Ireland’ in T.B. Barry (ed.), A history of settlement in Ireland (London and New York, 2000), pp 110–23, at pp 118–23. 2  See above, pp 116–17. 3 Morley, Ire. under Eliz. & Jas I, p. 372. See P.J. Duffy, ‘Exploring townland geographies:

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the surrounding infields and outfields, as ‘clachans’ were organized in early modern times,4 at any rate in the county Cavan area, where the ‘law of Owen the Bearded’ originated, though we are assured by Sir Henry Piers that it was also used in Westmeath. ‘Owen the Bearded’ or Eógan na Fésóige O’Reilly, chief of east Breifne (county Cavan, d.1449), is praised in the traditional history of the O’Reillys as ‘a just lord, as is clear from every good reasonable law that he promulgated’,5 while the Annals of Breifne state: ‘It is this Eóghan who, with lay and ecclesiastic consent, composed the statutes by which the men of Breifne abide’.6 However it is left to Sir Henry Piers, in his ‘Chorographical Description’ of Westmeath, written in 1682, to tell us the contents of one law of ‘Owen the Bearded’. Piers gives a vivid description of the practical operation of cooperative farming in such small rural communities, noting the constant squabbling that accompanied the rotating location of shares in the ploughed fields, while the amount of stock any farmer was permitted to keep on the common grazing was proportionate to the acreage of arable he held. He explains that the large open fields were divided into strictly equal shares, but some farmers held more shares than others, ‘so as a man whose share may amount to three acres, shall not have perhaps half an acre together, but scattered up and down in all quarters of the field’. The point was that certain areas were known to be more fertile than others, and there was great competition for the best sites, so that a blind lottery drawn by a child was employed to avoid bitter disputes, and there was similar jealousy over the turf-cutting, with the landlord or his steward as the ultimate judge. The ‘law of Owen the Bearded’ was invoked when a farmer who was rich enough to afford a complete plough and team for his own land refused to plough land jointly with another man who could only afford one horse and part of the plough tackle (the position of the ócaire, or lowest grade of freeman in Old Irish law). Since this refusal made it impossible for the small-holder to plough his own share, and consequently to pay that year’s rent to the landlord, through no fault of his own, ‘Owen the Bearded’ had decreed that if the small-holder brought his horse and tackle to the field every day in the ploughing season and offered to cooperate, even though he was refused, at the end of the year the landlord forced the richer man to share his harvest with the poor man as if they had jointly cultivated, so that he could collect rent from both.7 The medieval and later term landholding and landscape in county Monaghan from the sixteenth century’ in Monaghan Hist. & Soc., pp 265–316, at p. 278. 4  James Anderson, ‘Rundale, rural economy and agrarian revolution: Tirhugh, 1715–1855’ in Donegal Hist. & Soc., 447–69; E.A. Currie, ‘Landscape development in north-west and south-east Derry, 1700–1840’ in Derry Hist. & Soc., pp 321–58, at pp 337–8; Kelly, Early Irish farming, p. 371. For a sceptical view of demonstrable continuity with an earlier period, see Charles Doherty, ‘Settlement in early Ireland: a review’ in Barry (ed.), A history of settlement in Ireland, pp 50–80, at pp 59–62. 5 James Carney (ed.), A genealogical history of the O’Reillys ([Cavan] 1959), pp 49, 95–6. 6 Ibid., pp 19–20. See above, p. 178. 7 Sir Henry Piers, A chorographical description of the

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for a ‘neighbour’, comarsa, seems to originate in the clustering of houses at the centre of such ‘rundale’ or ‘clachan’ communities, as it refers to a ‘shared doorpost’ (airsa), suggesting semi-detached or terraced houses.8 Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century observers noted the extreme mobility of the renter class, moving as much as every year from one landlord to another, seeking better terms, and relying on their new landlord to protect them from demands for back-rent from the last one.9 Interestingly, we have a hint that this mobility was already found among the bothaig and fuidri, the share-cropping or renter class in the Old Irish law tracts, because the hereditary serfs are distinguished from them by the term senchléithe, ‘old wickerwork huts’.10 This implies that those tenants who were not ‘bound to the soil’, like the senchléithe or serfs, were distinguishable by their recently-built houses. A house of wattle-anddaub could be thrown up in a short space of time, at little cost, and abandoned without problem when the owner moved elsewhere, but if a bothach or fuidir’s family remained on the same estate for three generations or more (the family home becoming well-worn over time), their status was reduced to serfs under Old Irish law, though the legal rank of ‘serf ’ had become almost extinct by the sixteenth century.11 However, the comment that these mobile renters relied on the new landlord to protect them from demands for arrears from the previous landlord implies that they had not moved very far, and were still in the same neighbourhood and local jurisdiction. Father Peadar Livingstone, with the help of the 1962 electoral register, has demonstrated in detail, in relation to Fermanagh, the factual base for the long-held generalization that Irish surnames display remarkable continuity of occupation in the areas with which they were associated in medieval times.12 Such a static, dispersed population laid great value on receiving news of the outside world, and Edmund Spenser assures us graphically that they welcomed any stranger as a source of information, whether a distinguished visitor or strolling entertainer: Next to [these rakehell horseboyes] there is another much like, but much more lewde and dishonest, and that is, of their Carrowes [professional gamblers] … And to these may be added another sort of like loose fellowes, county of Westmeath, written AD1682 (repr. Naas, 1981, from Charles Vallancey, Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis I), pp 115–20. 8 RIA Dictionary, s.v. ‘comarsa’, ‘airsa’. 9 Spenser, A View, ed. Hadfield & Maley, pp 82–3; Calendar of state papers: Ireland, 1608–10, ed. C.W. Russell and J.P. Prendergast (London, 1874), p. 533. 10 Binchy, Críth Gablach, pp 78, 93, 105; Kelly, Early Irish law, pp 33–6; idem, Early Irish farming, pp 440–2; for discussion of any continuity with the tenants-at-will of the sixteenth century see H.S. Maine, Lectures on the early history of institutions (7th ed., London, 1914), pp 172–85. 11 On the last serfs, see Katharine Simms, ‘Gaelic culture and society’ in Brendan Smith (ed.), The Cambridge history of Ireland, 1 (Cambridge, 2018), pp 414–40, at pp 415–16. 12 Peadar Livingstone, The Fermanagh story (Enniskillen, 1969), pp 418–45.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages which doe passe up and downe amongst gentle men by the name of Iesters, but are (indeed) notable rogues … and common carryers of newes, with desire whereof you would wonder how much the Irish are fed; for they use commonly to send up and downe to knowe newes, and if any meet with another, his second word is, What news? Insomuch that hereof is tolde a prettie jest of a French man, who having beene sometimes in Ireland, where he marked their great inquirie for newes, and meeting afterwards in France an Irishman, whom hee knew in Ireland, first saluted him, and afterwards said thus merrily: O Sir, I pray you tell me of curtesie, have you heard anything of the news, that you so much inquired for in your country?13

As can be easily deduced from this passage, Spenser was not an admirer of Gaelic Ireland, but his assertion that the second question put to every stranger was an enquiry after news is remarkably in accordance with the conversational pattern in medieval Irish fiction. A quick electronic search of the texts in Standish O’Grady’s anthology of medieval tales, Silva Gadelica, turned up at least sixteen examples where the ‘second question put to every stranger’ was a demand for news.14 Also of interest is Spenser’s claim that the privileged class of travelling entertainers were valued by the gentry as much for the news they brought from other parts of Ireland as for their professional services. Síle Bourke, the young widow of the MacWilliam Bourke of Mayo, probably Theobald son of Walter Ciotach (d.1606),15 was reminded by her bard of the glory days when poets came to her husband’s court from the banks of the Liffey in Leinster, or from county Clare, scholars from Donegal, storytellers from every part of Ireland, musicians rehearsing ballads to stringed music as the wine circulated.16 One question apparently put by wealthier hosts was a competitive enquiry as to the comparative liberality and splendour of other feasts the travelling poets had attended. There is an apocryphal tale in the sixteenth-century Leabhar Eoghanach concerning Áed Remor O’Neill (king of Tír Eógain, d.1364), whose fame for generosity and munificence was so high, it says, that O’Conor of Connacht sent a kinsman to O’Neill’s court to test the report, and was inevitably 13 Spenser, A view, ed. Hadfield & Maley, p. 78. My square brackets. 14 O’Grady, Silva Gadelica, 1, pp 139, 175, 182–3, 223, 260, 269, 294–5, 312–13, 330, 356, 373–4, 375; 2, pp 152, 197, 206, 253, 294–5, 304, 330, 351, 372, 398, 410–11, 412, 461–2, 506. 15 Katharine Simms, ‘Bardic poems of consolation to bereaved Irish ladies’ in Conor Kostick (ed.), Medieval Italy, medieval and early modern women (Dublin, 2010), pp 220–30, at p. 226, note 21. 16 ABM, no. 298: ‘17 Do bhidis ag tríall dod thigh .éigsi o chois Lithfe a Laighnibh / filidh thoghuidhe chrú cCais . na sgoluighe o Bhrú Bearnais. / 18 Do-cluinthi libh san lis[s]in . a n-óineacht ‘ga n/innisin / ad chuirt tháobhaird sheanta sheaing . sgélta as gac aonaird d’Eirinn. 19 Do cleachta laoighe o lucht ciúil . gotha sidhe téad ttaighiúir / a rioghchráobh o mhúr Meadhbha .ré súdh bfhionncháor bfhíneamhna.’

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informed there was no palace of king or lord in Ireland to equal it.17 Gilla Brigde MacConmide (MacNamee), the famous thirteenth-century bard, assured the prince Roalb MacMahon, lord of Dartree in Monaghan, that after touring all Ireland, he found that only Roalb met the poet’s high standards for liberality.18

ASSEMBLIES

Kings and lords could crowd their houses with entertaining strangers. Lower ranks, spread out as they were across the countryside, had to make an effort to meet up, to exchange news, purchase exotic goods, engage in match-making, sales of stock, horse-racing, dog-coursing, hurley matches, law-suits, and as Edmund Spenser would have it, conspiracies to commit crime or rebellion.19 There were many terms for such popular assemblies. Óenach simply means ‘a uniting’, a gathering into one (óen), but the word has survived into modern Irish as aonach, ‘a fair’. From pre-Christian times, it appears, there were certain customary times of the year and places of assembly for people drawn together from many tuatha, or local kingdoms, the greatest being the Óenach Tailten or ‘Fair of Tailtiu’ (Teltown, county Meath), held ‘a fortnight before Lugnasad [1 August, or ‘Lammas’] and a fortnight after’, and attended principally by inhabitants of territories ruled by the Northern and Southern Uí Néill (Meath, Westmeath, Longford and all Ulster west of the Bann).20 As we have seen in an earlier chapter, in the course of the late ninth to eleventh centuries, increasing rivalry and conflict between the Northern and Southern Uí Néill and the eventual replacement of both dynasties in the high-kingship led to a gradual discontinuance of this greatest of all the Irish assemblies,21 but others continued as explicitly Christian festivals. Large, almost province-wide assemblies at major church sites were held on the occasion of certain holy days, as we are told of seventh-century Kildare on St Brigit’s Day: Who can count the different crowds and numberless people flocking from all the provinces – some for the abundant feasting, others for the healing of their afflictions, others to watch the pageant of the crowds, others with great gifts and offerings – to join in the solemn celebration of the feast of Saint Brigit … on the first day of February.22 17 Ó Donnchadha, Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe, pp 32–3. 18 Above, p. 362. 19 Spenser, A view, ed. Hadfield & Maley, pp 79–81. The most detailed description of activities at early medieval Irish assemblies can be found in Chap. 4: ‘Feasts, festivals and fairs’ in A.B. Gleason, ‘Entertainment in early Ireland’ (PhD, TCD, 2002). 20  R.A.S. Macalister (ed.), Lebor Gabála Érenn: The Book of the Taking of Ireland (5 vols, Dublin, 1938–56), 4, pp 114–19, 148– 9, 178–9. See Máire MacNeill, The festival of Lughnasa (Oxford, 1962, repr. Dublin, 2008), pp 311–38; D.A. Binchy, ‘The Fair of Tailtiu and the Feast of Tara’, Ériu, 18 (1958), 113–38. 21 Above, pp 50, 53–4. 22 Seán Connolly and Jean-Michel Picard, ‘Cogitosus: the Life of

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The fair of St Colmán of Lann Elo or Lynally, attended by the Fir Cell (barony of Eglish, county Offaly), was also considered one of the three great fairs of Ireland, the other two great fairs being named in the ninth-century text, ‘The Triads of Ireland’, as Tailtiu and Cruachan,23 and in the later ‘Life of St Colmán’ as Tailtiu and Clonmacnois.24 The annals record faction-fighting taking place in Clonmacnois on St Ciarán’s Day, which is reminiscent of activities at a nineteenth-century fair, and suggests the assembled crowds were not exclusively engaged in religious celebration. Similar entries about disturbances marring the feast of Whitsuntide at Armagh indicate this church festival may have replaced the legendary Óenach Emna, or ‘Fair of Emain Macha’, in the same way that Ciarán’s Day at Clonmacnois seems to have replaced the ‘Fair of Cruachan’ in Connacht.25 All these great assemblies were discontinued after the AngloNorman conquest, though in many cases minor folk festivals continued on their sites until the early modern period.26 However gatherings of inhabitants in the local regions continued into the sixteenth century, sometimes on traditional hill-sites, as we find Sir Seaán O’Reilly in 1583 was made to promise to discontinue the practice of ‘Iraghtes (airechta) or parles upon hills’,27 and Edmund Spenser complained in 1598 of the ‘great use amongst the Irish to make great assemblies together upon a rath or hill, there to parlie, as they say, about matters and wrongs betweene township and township, or between one privat person and another’.28 The word airecht is more specific than óenach, being used in the Old Irish tracts for a law court, held before a judge and, at least for the more important cases, tried in the open at a customary site with the participation of the free landowning class, the airig.29 There are actually a few stone chairs, or chair-shaped rocks, on open-air mounds in Ireland and Scotland named locally as the ‘Brehon’s Chair’ or ‘Judge’s Chair’.30 Such hills of assembly might be topped by an ancient venerated tree, often a thorn tree, as in the case of Sceithín na gCeann (‘the whitethorn of the [severed] heads’) in O’Conor Roe’s country (north Roscommon). There the ancient thorn on top of a hill associated with Finn and the Fianna, which was apparently chopped down in the early seventeenth century by the new English landlord, was lamented in a bardic poem by Domnall Caech Ó hUicinn, who tells us he remembers many an assembly there, the hill used to be covered with horses, now it is empty of prince or warrior, lacking the St Brigit’, JRSAI, 117 (1987), 5–27: 27. 23 Kuno Meyer (ed.), The Triads of Ireland (Dublin and London, 1906), §35. 24 Plummer, Bethada Náem nÉrenn, 1, p. 178; 2, pp 171–2 (§§ 30, 31). 25 AFM 2, pp 738–9, 834–7 (AD998, 1038); Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster to 1131, pp 276–7, 346–7 (AD819, 893); Edward Gwynn (ed.), The metrical Dindshenchas (5 vols, Dublin, 1903–35), 3, pp 20–1; MacNeill, The festival of Lughnasa, p. 339; Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 62–3. 26 MacNeill, The festival of Lughnasa, pp 311–49. 27 Kelly, Early Irish law, p. 141, note 124. 28 Spenser, A view, ed. Hadfield & Maley, p. 79. 29 Kelly, Early Irish law, pp 191–2; Binchy, Críth Gablach, p. 73. 30 FitzPatrick, Royal inauguration, pp 134–6.

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music of the harp.31 Another poem by Laisech Mac an Baird was probably inspired by the loss of the same thorn-tree: The thorn of acclamation [or ‘concourse’], a torment to all I used to see as a place of assembly: the cutting of the branch, my day of sorrow! The state of the land is baser thereafter.32 The poet actually compares his grief at the loss of the thorn to lamenting the sufferings of Christ on the cross. Until about the end of the eleventh century, Ireland had many venerated trees, either singly or in groves, planted on inauguration mounds or at church sites,33 the best-known being, of course, the great oak-tree at St Brigit’s foundation of Kildare, which the late twelfth-century Fourth Life of Brigit tells us was by then so old only a stump remained as a focus of pilgrimage.34 A connection between such trees and royal inauguration is shown in the Second Life of St Máedóc of Ferns, when it prescribes: ‘let O’Duffey give the wand (of office) to the king of Breifne in honour of Maedoc. And this wand must be cut from the hazel of Maedoc in Sescenn Uairbeoil in Leinster.’35 However, a less Christian link between a venerated tree and judgement in law-suits is suggested in the Latin Life of St Berach. This relates that the site of the saint’s church (Kilbarry, near Termonbarry, county Roscommon) was disputed by a local druid, and the case was decided by the king of Breifne, Áed Finn, in favour of St Berach, but the druid objected and wanted the case re-tried in Rathin, because at that site grew a certain very tall tree said to contain a devil who was accustomed to give answers to the pagans, and the druid thought that there he could more easily bend the judgement in his favour if he was judged under the tree consecrated to demons.36 In the corresponding ‘Irish Life of St Berach’, which may date to the fourteenth century, the druid is described as a poet, making the tale relevant to a contemporary confrontation between the church and the poets, and while the tree is still magically transported to the saint’s choice of venue, it is now described as a whitethorn, and all reference to the demon is dropped,37 suggesting the earlier pagan 31 ‘Do thuit aonchrann Inse Fáil’, ABM, no. 197. 32 Bergin, IBP, no. 10, verse 2. The variant in square brackets was suggested by Bergin. 33 A.T. Lucas, ‘The sacred trees of Ireland’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 68 (1963), 16–54. 34  Richard Sharpe, Medieval Irish saints’ Lives (Oxford, 1991), pp 161, 210–11. 35 Plummer, Bethada Náem nÉrenn, 2, pp 196–7; Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 22–3, 30–1. 36  Dixit quoque magus, quod in loco qui Rathin dicitur, et non in alio subiret iudicium; et hoc ideo promisit, quod ibi erat arbor quedam excelsa, in qua, ut fertur, diabolus responsa dare consueuit infidelibus. Arte enim magica inclusus ibi, cultoribus suis, que poterat, responsa dabat. Credens enim ut, presidio demonum fulcitus, ibi facilius posset iudicium sententiam pro se flectere, et propter hoc sub arbore demonibus consecrata iudicium subire voluit. Plummer, Vit. Sanct. Hib., 1, p. 83. 37 Plummer, Bethada Náem nÉrenn, 1,

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significance of venerated trees at places of judgement, assembly or royal inauguration had become vaguer. In the later Middle Ages, in any case, local assemblies often came to be merged with the chieftains’ feast-days or rent-days, and held on the green outside the lord’s castle. Significant dates in the church’s year that were marked by public assemblies were primarily Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide. De Perellós, the pilgrim to St Patrick’s Purgatory who visited Niall Óc O’Neill in 1397, tells us: ‘On Christmas Day, as my interpreters and others who could speak Latin told me, the king held a great court’. He describes the nobles’ costumes: The great lords wear tunics without a lining, reaching to the knee. [They wear them] cut very low at the neck, almost in the style of women, and they wear great hoods which hang down to the waist, the point of which is narrow as a finger. They wear neither hose nor shoes, nor do they wear breeches, and they wear their spurs on their bare heels. The king was dressed like that on Christmas Day and so were all the clerks and knights and even the bishops and abbots and the great lords … The king had then three thousand horses or more. There was a great number of poor people following him and I saw the king giving them great alms [in the form] of ox-meat.38 Older agricultural festivals of pagan origin were St Brigit’s Day (1 February) and Lammas or Lugnasa (1 August) in connection with cereal production, and Beltaine (1 May) and Samain (1 November), the dates when cattle were driven to the summer pastures and returned back at the beginning of winter, while New Year’s Day and St John’s Eve (the summer solstice) were also observed as bonfire nights.39 In 1610, Sir Toby Caulfield explained that the Great O’Neill was accustomed to take his rents or tributes twice a year at May Day and Allhallowtide (Beltaine and Samain), because this was when his officers counted the cows, charging the farmers 12d. per cow per quarter year.40 Since the cattle would then be issuing either from the winter settlements towards the summer pastures, or from the temporary summer shielings (or ‘booleys’) back down to the winter fields on these dates, it would be most convenient for the chief ’s officers to count them on those particular days. The Anglo-Irish Great Rolls of the Pipe (the sheriffs’ accounts to the exchequer) record in 1253–4 that the feast of St Martin (11 November) and ‘Beltone’ (Beltaine, May Day) were rent-days in the earldom of p. 36; 2, p. 35; above, pp 257–9; Katharine Simms, ‘An eaglais agus filí na scol’ in Pádraig Ó Fiannachta (ed.), An dán díreach, Léachtaí Cholm Cille 24 (Maigh Nuad, 1994), pp 21–36. 38 Carpenter, ‘The pilgrim from Catalonia’, pp 110–11. Translator’s square brackets. On the nobles’ bare feet, see above, p. 427. 39 See Kevin Danaher, The year in Ireland (Cork, 1972), pp 13, 86, 134, 167–77, 206, 262. 40 Cal. state papers, Ire., 1608–10, p. 533.

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Ulster.41 The rare surviving ‘Covenant’ or agreement, drawn up between the chief Mageoghegan of Westmeath and his subordinate ally O’Kearney or ‘the Fox’ (An Sinnach) of Muintir Thadgáin (barony of Kilcoursey, county Offaly) in 1526, compels the Fox to attend with the chief nobles of his territory at every assembly or court (airechtas/oireachtus) held by Mageoghegan in his territory at Samain (1 November) or Beltaine (1 May) either at Ardnurcher, where Mageoghegan occupied a former de Lacy castle, or at Corr-na-sgean, an unidentified place-name.42 The late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century comic tale, ‘O’Donnell’s Kern’, or ‘the Narrow-striped Kern’ (An Ceatharnach Caoilriabhach), has repeated allusions to nobles holding their aonach and oireachtus, ‘assembly and court’ on the green outside their chief residences.43 The common coupling of the term óenech with airechtas44 is a reminder that while the core of such an assembly might be the meeting of the airecht, the fringes included a general assembly of the public, the óenech, including what Spenser unkindly described as ‘all the scumme of the people’.45 The airecht consisted of a council of the leading nobles of the district, the airechta or ‘urraghts’, with their king or lord, to form a court of final appeal for settling inter-territorial disputes or important law-suits, to receive deputations from subordinate allies, to announce the rate of tax or billeting arrangements for the coming year, to approve the election of a new chief, even to announce a future hosting to war, as freemen could not be penalized for failing to answer the king’s summons to war unless it had been publicly announced with at least three days notice.46 To get an idea of the activities associated with the more general assembly, the óenech, one can search the corpus of bardic poetry.47 In religious poetry, Judgement Day is figuratively described as God’s óenech,48 perhaps mainly because of its association with the lord’s rent-day, because the archangel Michael, who is commonly depicted in European art as weighing the souls on Judgement Day to determine if they should go to Heaven or Hell, is described in Irish bardic poetry as God’s máer, His ‘bailiff’, or ‘rent-collector’.49 41  ‘Catalogue of the Great Rolls of the Pipe’, Rep. DKPRI, no. 38, ‘Appendix’, p. 51. 42 John O’Donovan (ed.), ‘Covenant between Mageoghegan and the Fox’ in Miscellany of the Irish Archaeological Society, 1 (Dublin 1846), 179–97: 192–3. 43 O’Grady, Silva Gadelica, 1, pp 279, 284; 2, pp 314, 320. See above, p. 399. 44 Also found, for example, in the Fenian tale Toraighecht an Ghilla Dhecair, O’Grady, Silva Gadelica, 1, pp 269, 273; 2, pp 304, 309. 45 Spenser, A view, p. 79. 46 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 24, 44, 60, 64–5, 67–75, 82, 121; eadem, ‘The contents of later commentaries on the Brehon law tracts’, Ériu, 49 (1998), 23–40: 26–30. Above, p. 421. 47 I am much indebted to Professor Damian McManus for giving me a single electronic file of all the published and unpublished bardic poetry surveyed by his Trinity College project. 48 DiD, nos. 24, verse 1; 53, verse 9; ABM, no. 190, verse 9; Cuthbert Mhág Craith, ‘Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig’, Celtica, 4 (1958), 105–205: 157 verse 204. 49 Mhág Craith, ‘Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig’, 161, verse 230; Lambert McKenna (ed.), Dánta do chum Aonghus Fionn Ó Dálaigh (Dublin, 1919), nos. 31, passim; 37, verse 10;

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More unusually, Judgement Day is also likened to the óenech, or mustering at the hill of assembly, that precedes a hosting to war (éirghe amach, ‘rising-out’), with the obligation on all freemen who answer the summons to come fully equipped, with weapons and food for three days.50 It should be made clear that while the principal payment collected for the lord, cís (later spelled cíos), translates as ‘rent’ in modern Irish, a more appropriate rendition for the medieval period would be ‘tax’ or ‘tribute’. All freehold land in a local kingdom, apart from exempt estates of the church, the poets or other privileged classes, was held subject to the royal exactions of slógad, cís & congbáil, that is, the public liability to send armed men to a duly proclaimed hosting (slógad), an annual payment to the king as a ‘sign of lordship’, or tribute (comartha tigernais, cís), and an obligation to ‘maintenance’ (congbáil), to lodge and feed the king and his court when they came on circuit, or to maintain mercenary soldiers or other servants of the king when sent on billet.51 While many of the references in religious poetry suggest that a coward, or a person with outstanding debts, might view an approaching óenech with some apprehension, the general literary associations are with great enjoyment and happiness on these occasions. As Gofraid Finn Ó Dálaig expressed it, the contrast between the pleasures of this world and the joys of Heaven resemble the contrast between a dark, black cave, and a hill of assembly during an óenech.52 One of the joys of the assemblies was associated with the mingling of the sexes, and the opportunities for picking partners. The celebrated poet Tadc Óc Ó hUicinn said of Niall Óc O’Neill: In assemblies (i ndáil aonaigh) he casts the net of Ó Duibhne on his ladyloves, each lady, her five sense throbbing, seeks Niall Óg, Eoghan’s scion.53 The comparison here is with Diarmait Ó Duibne, romantic hero of the Fianna cycle of tales, who had a ‘love-spot’ (ball seirce) on his face or chest which made him irresistible to women.54 In similar vein, a later poem addresses an unnamed man:

39, verse 22, etc.; DiD, nos. 1, verse 13; 10, verse 31; 11, verses 7, 10, 29, 30, 32; 12, verses 13, 14 etc. 50 DiD, no. 20, verses 3, 8. 51 Simms, From kings to warlords, pp 130–5, 141–5; C.A. Empey and Katharine Simms, ‘The ordinances of the White Earl and the problem of coign in the later Middle Ages’, PRIA, 75C (1975), 161–87: 178–83. 52 DiD, no. 37, verse 24: A-tá idir neamh na naoi ngrádh . is aoibhneas talmhan thonnbhán . mbí idir uaimh dhorcha dhuibh . agus tolcha i n-uair aonaigh. 53  Aithd., no. 15, verse 24: ‘Líonta hÍ Dhuibhne i ndáil aonaigh . ar a mhnáibh suirghe seolaidh; bean ag léim le cóig gciallaibh . d’iarraidh Néill Óig í Eoghain’. 54 Damian McManus, ‘Good-looking and irresistible: the hero from early Irish saga to classical poetry’, Ériu, 59 (2009), 57–109: 67–9.

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Black of brow, with cheeks aglow . blue of eye with hair so smooth, Wind rowing through your parted locks . fine women at the fair (mná an aonaigh) are watching. Wives, pretending not to look . plait their hair in front of you With fingers through her lovely hair . one of them is watching you.55 Unsurprisingly, clerical sources are censorious of this aspect of the óenech. The tenth- or eleventh-century monk, who wrote regretting his wandering thoughts during church service, said they strayed Tre airechtu athlama . tre buidne ban mbóeth, ‘Through eager [or ‘athletic’] assemblies, through companies of foolish [or ‘wanton’] women’.56 A Counter-Reformation poem of advice to a young woman adjured her to avoid frequenting the street or the fair (aonach), or making a joyless tryst with a man.57 Assemblies were also the occasion for sporting events. The poet Fergal Mac Eochada, mourning the death of his patron Fiacha mac Áeda O’Byrne (‘Feagh McHugh’, d.1597), said his depression could not be lifted by feast-days, banqueting or games of chess, by slender hounds chasing mighty stags, the performance of horses or warrior-like exercises, or the pleasant sight of a fair (aonach), on level plain or bright hilltop.58 The other aristocratic pastimes the poet mentions here are not necessarily associated with the óenech, but horse-racing and athletic contests clearly were, both in Scotland and Ireland, as had been the case in pre-Norman times.59 A eulogy addressed by Tadc Ó hUicinn to the young Magnus O’Conor (king of Connacht, d.1293) boasts that he possesses every martial skill (‘gach cleas’)60 practised by the mythical Lug and Cú Chulainn – in every time of óenech he is known to be victorious (buadhach) in every special talent (buaidh); he has worked to master every skill belonging to an óenech, spear against curved shield. It goes on to praise his white horse, comparing her to famous horses of legendary or historical heroes, including a certain Síoda Odhar, ‘known at every óenech’, and the latter’s horse Lámhach, though she was not white.61 The late fifteenthcentury Scottish poet, Finlay ‘the Red Bard’, praised the horse of the chief John MacGregor both as a war-horse and a race-horse, sure to win wagers – ‘his might has been shown in the óenech, though he be gentle in the enclosure,’ and once 55 ‘Duibhe id mhailghibh’, from Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella (ed. and trans.), An Duanaire, 1600–1900: poems of the dispossessed (Dublin, 1981), pp 14–15. 56 Gerard Murphy, Early Irish lyrics (Oxford, 1956), pp 40–1. Suggested variants in square brackets are mine, based on RIA Dictionary. Frank O’Connor, Kings, lords and commons (New York, 1959), p. 10, renders the lines ‘Through august assemblies, groups of gamesome girls’. 57 ‘Ná taithigh aonach ná sráid . ná déan dáil re fear gan sult’, from ‘T’aire riot a mhacaoimh mná’, T.F. Ó Rathile (ed.), Dánta grádha (2nd ed., Cork, 1926), no. 76, verse 7. 58 Mac Airt, Leabhar Branach, no. 45, ll. 4250–61. 59 Gleason, ‘Entertainment in early Ireland’, pp 152–7 (see above note 19). 60 See above, p. 404n. 61 ‘Gach éan mar a adhbha’, DiD, no. 98, verses 11, 12, 38.

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more this (riding) horse is compared to the (chariot) horses of Cú Chulainn.62 In both cases there is a lack of clear distinction between the horse’s performance in competitions and in battle. One is reminded of the extreme speed shown by Art MacMurrough’s riding-horse (see Plate VIII), which the chronicler Jean Creton alleges cost him four hundred cows: down it galloped, so hard that, in my opinion, I never, in all my life, saw hare, deer, sheep or any other animal, I declare to you for a certainty, run with such speed as it did. In his hand he bore a great long dart, which he cast with much skill.63 Since the chief was advancing towards a peaceful parley, his tossing a spear while riding at top speed suggests he was showing off one of the many martial arts suitable for display at an óenech. However, entertainment at the óenech was not limited to equestrian events. There was also dog-racing. Áed Maguire (lord of Fir Manach, d.1600) appears to have held regular assemblies on the green of his castle at Enniskillen. When he reconquered the castle from the English in May 1595 his poet, the famous Eochaid Ó hEogusa, celebrated the fact that accustomed life at the castle could resume: Thou shalt see, as thou wert wont to do at first, every side of thy fair green lawn upturned and reddened by the racing (ó chomhghraifne) of fleet steeds … Thou shalt see about the skirts of thy slopes steeds and red-headed hounds racing (coimhling), galleys rowing beside thy bank, and a crowd on every hilltop.64 The almost equally famous author, Fergal Óc Mac an Baird, in a poem to Áed Ruad (‘Red Hugh’, d.1602) O’Donnell, implies that even the most distinguished poets performed in the open air on the occasion of an óenech, as well as providing entertainment to invited guests at the lord’s wine-feast, when he asserts: ‘To be honoured by his prince on meeting-days (i láibh aonaigh) or at wine-feasts, counts for an ollamh as wealth’.65 Open-air performance is also implied in Ó hEogusa’s poem on the recapture of Enniskillen, when he hopes nostalgically: ‘As was their wont of yore, the poets of the Isle of Laoghaire [i.e., ‘Ireland’] will 62 ‘Gealladh gach saoi don each odhar’, W.J. Watson, Scottish verse from the Book of the Dean of Lismore (Edinburgh, 1937), pp 140–3. 63 John Webb (ed.), ‘Translation of a French metrical history of the deposition of King Richard II’, Archaeologia, 20 (1824), 1–423: 37; quoted in Darren McGettigan, Richard II and the Irish kings (Dublin, 2016), p. 176. 64 Bergin, IBP, no. 31, verses 11, 13. 65 ‘Ionnmhas ollaimh onóir ríogh’, Lambert McKenna, ‘Some Irish bardic poems: To Red Hugh O’Donnell’, Studies, 41 (1952), 99–104: 102.

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be shouting on the slopes of thy court’.66 He mentions also storytellers from outside the territory (thus with a stock of tales not heard before?) and harpists. Our fullest descriptions of the lower-class entertainers who accompanied the poets to feasts and festivals come from sixteenth-century English and AngloIrish observers, but their existence is documented in early literature, and in the texts and commentaries of the Brehon law tracts, which mention pipers, jugglers, jesters, acrobats and professional farters.67 In 1561, Thomas Smith reported: Their be many braunches belonging to the foure sortes [of áes eladan, ‘men of art’]; as the Gogathe, which is to say in English, the glutayne, for one of them will eate 2 or 3 galons of butter at a sitinge, halfe a mutton. And an other, called the Caruage [cerrbach, ‘professional gambler’]; he is much like the habram’s man, and comenlye he goeth nakid, and carise dise and cardes with him; and he will play the heare off his head and his eares; and theis be mantained by the Rymers.68 The equating of the gambler with an ‘Abraham’s man’ betrays the political motivation behind the English reportage. ‘Abraham’s men’ were beggars who claimed the charity of the public posing as newly discharged lunatics from the Abraham’s ward of the famous London asylum, St Mary of Bethlehem, or ‘Bedlam’ for short. In 1561 they were being identified as a prime example of fraudulent mendicants, or ‘sturdy beggars’.69 New poor laws were passed in Tudor England, partly to replace the almshouses and hospitals affected by the dissolution of the monasteries. As poor relief in every parish was financed by a tax on the local landowners, there was a drive to minimize the call on the parish purse by expelling all the healthy adult unemployed. All itinerant entertainers were obliged to register themselves as employed by some wealthy patron, a law that famously affected Shakespeare’s company of actors.70 English reformers were also determined to eliminate the huge proportion of travelling craftsmen and entertainers in Ireland, but limited themselves to punitive legislation, without establishing parish poorhouses for those in real need. One of the most eminent Irish poets of the late sixteenth century, Tadc Dall Ó hUicinn, found himself obliged to address a poem to the chief Cormac O’Hara, requesting to be nominally registered as his employee, to avoid the severe vagrancy laws.71 Richard Stanihurst tells us a little more about the gambler, or cerrbach:

66 Bergin, IBP, no. 31, verse 16. 67 Kelly, Early Irish law, p. 64; O’Sullivan, Hospitality, pp 238–9. See above, Fig. 35. 68 H.F. Hore, ‘Irish bardism in 1561’, UJA, 1st ser., 6 (1858), 165–7, 202–12:167. My square brackets. 69 A.L. Beier, Masterless men: the vagrancy problem in England, 1560–1640 (London, 1985), pp 115–16. 70 Ibid., pp 96–9. 71 Knott, Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn, no. 30.

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Gaelic Ulster in the Middle Ages There is among them a brotherhood of Karrowes, that profer to play at chartes [cards] all the yere long, and make it their onely occupation. They play away mantle and all to the bare skin, and then truss themselues in strawe or in leaues; they wayte for passengers in the high way, inuite them to game vpon the grene, & aske them no more but companions to holde them sporte. For default of other stuffe, they paune theyr glibs, the nailes of their fingers and toes, their dimissaries, which they leese or redeeme at the curtesie of the wynner.72

It is possible that his reference to the gamblers being trussed in straw or leaves because they had gambled ‘the shirt off their back’ so to speak may involve something of a misunderstanding. Captain Josias Bodley, in a light-hearted account (in Latin) of a visit to Lecale, county Down, in the New Year of 1603, recalls that the English garrison there was visited by a group of four of the local Irish or Anglo-Irish gentry who hoped to win money from them at card-games, but ended losing all their cash to the Englishmen. He describes their first entry, preceded by a letter in the tradition of mummers, proclaiming themselves as wandering strangers, come to spend a few hours with their hosts: and leave being given, they entered in this order: first a boy, with a lighted torch; then two, beating drums; then the maskers two and two; then another torch … They were dressed in shirts, with many ivy leaves sewed on here and there over them; and had over their faces masks of dog-skin, with holes to see out of, and noses made of paper; their caps were high and peaked (in the Persian fashion,) and were also of paper, and ornamented with the same (ivy) leaves.73 This description sounds not unlike the modern Straw Boys (see Fig. 36), associated with mumming, and the Christmas and New Year season, and in this passage also with gambling, so the straw and leaves in which the cerrbach was trussed may have been a mumming costume.

E V E RY D AY L I V I N G C O N D I T I O N S

However, as the poet Conchobar Rúad Mac Con Mide remarked sadly, in his elegy for Philip Maguire (d.1470): ‘Ní lá áonuigh gach áonlá’ (‘Not every day is a fair-day’).74 The realities of everyday life were harsh enough, and perhaps more so in Gaelic Ulster than in other parts of Ireland. It is noticeable that the agriculture and diet described in the Brehon laws, texts originally composed 72 Miller & Power, Holinshed’s Ir. Chron., p. 114. 73 ‘Bodley’s visit to Lecale, county of Down, AD1602–3’, UJA, 1st ser., 2 (1854), 73–95: 92. 74 From ‘Do caitheadh aoibhneas

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Fig. 36 Strawboy costume. Image reproduced by kind permission of the National Museum of Ireland.

between the seventh and ninth centuries AD, are typical of a mixed farming culture producing a wide variety of cereal crops,75 whereas the society of Gaelic Ireland, and particularly Ulster, in the later Middle Ages and early modern period, is shown as very heavily reliant on pastoralism, with oats as the predominant cereal grown.76 One reason for the contrast is very simple – the Brehon law texts were composed near the centres of power in early Ireland and these were located along the fertile, wheatgrowing southern and eastern parts, the very areas conquered and colonized by the Anglo-Normans, so that rather than a chronological change in agricultural practice, we are to some extent seeing the Gaelic inhabitants traditionally employing different methods on a different terrain, the more wooded and mountainous west and north of the country. As Domnall O’Neill’s manifesto addressed to Pope John XXII in 1317 expressed it with considerable exaggeration: They have driven us by force from the spacious places where we dwelt and from the inheritance of our fathers; they have compelled us to seek mountains, woods, bogs, barren tracts and even caverns in the rocks to save our lives; and for a long time back to make our dwellings there like beasts.77 The irony was that O’Neill himself had probably lost the least acreage of land to the invaders – the complaint was much better suited to the plight of the O’Byrnes and O’Tooles, driven from the plains of the Liffey into the Wicklow mountains. However there were other factors at play. Hard as it is to believe, Ireland’s climate was even wetter in the later Middle Ages, particularly in the fourteenth century, when Europe as a whole was experiencing a cyclical plunge from the ‘Medieval Warm period’ (950–1250) into a ‘Little Ice Age’ (1250–1650). Uladh’, ABM, no. 180, verse 2 (p. 233). 75  Kelly, Early Irish farming, pp 24–5; Edel Bhreatnach, ‘Communities and their landscapes’ in Smith (ed.), The Cambridge history of Ireland, 1, pp 25–6. 76 Kenneth Nicholls, ‘Gaelic society and economy in the high Middle Ages’ in NHI 2, pp 397–438 at pp 410–16; Regina Sexton, ‘Porridges, gruels and breads’ in M.A. Monk and John Sheehan (eds), Early medieval Munster (Cork, 1998), pp 76–86, at p. 84; J.P. Prendergast, ‘The Ulster creaghts’, JRSAI, 3 (1855), 420–30. 77 Edmund Curtis and

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Inclement weather resulted in famines, followed by plagues (most notoriously the Black Death 1347–8) and a subsequent reduction in population numbers. There was a general shift towards pastoral farming in many parts of Europe, driven by factors such as scarcity of labourers, resulting in higher wages, and a consequent wider consumption of more expensive foodstuffs such as fish and meat.78 In Gaelic Ulster there were also the unstable political conditions, with constant small-scale warfare. Childs and O’Neill have argued: As the area peacefully held by the Anglo-Irish landowners decreased and endemic raiding increased, livestock would undoubtedly seem a safer proposition than standing corn.79 In Ulster, ecclesiastical records indicate that this switch from corn-growing to pastoralism was not always a voluntary decision made for prudential reasons, but resulted from the violent invasion of farms and destruction of crops by the military following of local nobles, in many cases of the O’Neills, taking possession of church lands with their consolidated herds, or caeraigechta (AngloIrish: ‘creaghts’), representing mobile wealth, both the soldiers’ accumulated wages and their ongoing means of subsistence.80 Nevertheless, oats continued to be grown all across Ulster throughout the period, and porridge and oatcakes formed the staple diet of the lower classes. This is confirmed in the fascinating letter of Captain Cuellar, whose ship formed part of the Spanish Armada and was wrecked on the Sligo coast in late September 1588. He survived, and was smuggled by the Irish via Leitrim and Derry to safety in Scotland. His description of an early stage in his journey is suggestive of how a small village juggled the ploughing and harvesting of the oatcrops with the transhumance system of driving the cattle into the hill pastures in summer, where their owners sheltered in booley-huts or shielings, while they manufactured butter and cheese and lived on dairy-products or ‘white meats’, as Spenser calls them.81 R.B. McDowell (eds), Irish historical documents, 1172–1922 (London, 1943), p. 39. 78 Joan Thirsk, ‘Enclosing and engrossing’ in H.P.R. Finberg (gen. ed.), The agrarian history of England and Wales, iv, 1500–1640 (Cambridge, 1967), pp 209–10; Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘A consumer economy’ in Rosemary Horrox and W.M. Ormrod (eds), A social history of England, 1200–1500 (Cambridge, 2006), pp 238–59, at pp 240–2. See Katharine Simms, ‘The origins of the creaght: farming system or social unit?’ in Margaret Murphy and Matthew Stout (eds), Agriculture and settlement in Ireland (Dublin, 2015), pp 101–18. 79  Wendy Childs and Timothy O’Neill, ‘Overseas trade’ in NHI 2, pp 492–524, at p. 503. 80 Katharine Simms, ‘Nomadry in medieval Ireland : the origins of the creaght or caoraigheacht’, Peritia, 5 (1986), 379–91; eadem, ‘The origins of the creaght’; eadem, ‘The concordat between Primate John Mey and Henry O’Neill (1455)’, Archivium Hibernicum, 34 (1976/7), 71–82: 74. 81 Spenser, A view, ed. Hadfield & Maley, p. 55.

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Cuellar describes coming across a cluster of thirty huts completely deserted, and finding that the house he entered was used to store sheaves of oats, among which he slept. However the next morning he discovered the Irish inhabitants had come back to reap the fields nearby, suggesting they were sleeping in their booley in the hills, but returned by day to their main settlement to gather the harvest.82 Elsewhere he remarks: They live in thatched cabins and are all big men, handsome and well-built, and fleet as the roe-deer. They eat only once a day, and this has to be at night, and what they normally eat is oaten bread and butter. They drink sour milk, for they have no other drink. And they don’t drink water, though it’s the best in the world. On feast-days they eat some kind of halfcooked meat, with neither bread nor salt, for such is their custom. They dress accordingly, in tight hose and short loose coats of very coarse goat’s hair. They wrap up in blankets and wear their hair down to their eyes.83 The ‘blankets’ here mentioned refer to the signature shaggy Irish cloak, known as the ‘falding’ (Ir. fallaing), or ‘Waterford rug’, which the fourteenth-century pilgrim Ramon de Perellós, in a passage cited earlier, assured us was worn by rich and poor alike.84 It was made of coarsely woven frieze, with tufts of raw, unspun wool inserted in the weft,85 creating a kind of ‘faux fleece’, which was amazingly warm and resistant to damp, as Spenser reluctantly admits.86 It formed a significant export to the rest of Europe in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries,87 even becoming a fashion item in truncated form, rather like the Aran sweater of more recent times. (See Figs 37 and 38). Cuellar’s reference to the meat at feasts being served only half-cooked is reiterated in other sources, and one obvious cause is the custom, when holding an open-air feast, of slaughtering the animal on the spot, and boiling the meat in its hide (see above, Fig. 35). Presumably the hide eventually burns through, whether the meat is then fully cooked or not. However the statement that the general population ‘normally’ subsisted on a diet of oatcakes and butter eaten once a day, should not be taken as implying they ate nothing else when not attending a feast. We have two unusual sources of information on food that was not considered appropriate to serve at feasts, or to set before an honoured guest. One was the long satirical poem composed about 82 Patrick Gallagher and D.W. Cruikshank (trans.), ‘Francisco de Cuéllar, “Letter from one who sailed …”’ in P. Gallagher and D.W. Cruikshank (eds), God’s obvious design (London, 1990), pp 223–47, at 234–5. 83 Ibid., p. 238. 84 Above, p. 451. 85 H.F. McClintock, ‘The Mantle of St Brigid at Bruges’, JRSAI, 66 (1936), 32–40. 86 Spenser, A view, ed. Hadfield & Maley, pp 56–7. 87 ‘The libel of English policy’ in Thomas Wright (ed.), Political poems and songs relating to English history (2 vols, London, 1861), 2, p. 186; Timothy O’Neill, Merchants and mariners in medieval Ireland (Dublin, 1987), pp 68–70.

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Fig. 37 An Irishwoman in her national costume of a shaggy frieze cloak. Engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar c.1644?, image from Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto.

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Fig. 38 A woman of Dieppe, wearing a truncated version of the Irish frieze cloak. Engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar c.1644?, image from Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto.

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1600 by Aengus Rúad Ó Dálaig. His satire ranges so widely, insulting noble Gaelic and some Anglo-Irish families across the length and breadth of Ireland, that it was once speculated that he had been bribed by the agents of Lord Mountjoy and Sir George Carew to undermine the morale of the Gaelic Irish during the Nine Years War.88 However, a closer look at the names of the persons satirized changes the picture. For example Baron Conchobar Maguire of Enniskillen, known as ‘the English Maguire’, is savagely mocked,89 while there is no mention of the brothers Áed and Cúchonnacht Maguire, leaders in the rebellion. Even more interestingly there is an explicit exemption of the O’Donnells from all criticism with a clear implication that this immunity is the result of fear: Should I satirize the Clann Dálaigh [the O’Donnells] The race of Adam would not be a shelter to me; The Clann Dálaigh would be a shelter to me, Were I to satirize the race of old Adam.90 In 1599, Áed Rúad, or ‘Red Hugh’, O’Donnell led his army into Thomond, the O’Brien lordship in modern county Clare, at which time his soldiers plundered the herds of two distinguished poets, Maílín Óc Mac Bruaideda and his kinsman, Tadc mac Dáire. Tadc vented his anger in a severe warning of satire against Red Hugh, prophesying among other divine punishments, defeat in battle.91 Maílín Óc by contrast went to the O’Donnell leader’s camp and uttered a praise-poem in which he justified the raid on Clare as a revenge for historical O’Brien attacks on the north. He was rewarded with the return of his plundered cattle.92 If we posit that Aengus na n-Aer (‘A. of the Satires’) Ó Dálaig was similarly plundered, or threatened with plunder, by the time O’Donnell’s army reached West Cork in 1601, he may have ransomed his property by undertaking to satirize all O’Donnell’s enemies, or those who had failed to contribute to the chieftain’s cause. If that were the case, his poem is a very clever compromise, because without any mention of politics, he details an imaginary poetic circuit around Ireland in which all the butts of his satire displayed themselves as most inhospitable hosts, impoverished, mean and grasping. As a result, his poem is an encyclopedia of foodstuffs eaten by the poor, or even the famine-struck. For modern readers, it is a real advantage that the poem was edited by the nineteenth-century scholar John O’Donovan, who had witnessed not only the great potato famine of 1845–7, but earlier rural food shortages. He instantly recognized repeated references to holly-bark as something poor parents fed their 88 John O’Donovan (ed.), The tribes of Ireland: a satire by Aenghus O’Daly (Dublin, 1852), p. 22. 89 Ibid., pp 52–3. 90 Ibid., pp 54–5. 91 DiD, no. 95; trans. Lambert McKenna, ‘Poem to Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill’, The Irish Monthly, 49:572 (Feb. 1921), 67–70. 92 AFM 6, pp 2102–5 (AD1599).

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children to control their appetites, because it was an astringent that shrank their innards.93 He also knew, as did the medieval Irish, that an exclusively cereal diet without any accompaniment, or ‘kitchening’ (annlann), of butter, vegetables or protein derived from pulse, fish or meat would lead to blindness from vitamin deficiency.94 Other famine foods mentioned are bread made from acorns or oaten chaff,95 wormwood, wild garlic, a blackbird’s egg, barnacles, a robin roasted on a spit,96 shamrocks, and even exhumed human corpses, ‘when the snow is on the ground’,97 presumably halting decay. This last savage extreme reminds us that the poet, Aengus na nÁer, came from west Cork, and had lived through Lord Grey’s suppression of the Desmond Rebellion, during which Grey’s scorched earth policy, and the ravages of the rebels themselves, combined to create a famine so drastic that even the hard-hearted Edmund Spenser was moved, though he laid all the blame on the rebels: Out of every corner of the woods and glynnes they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legges could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could finde them, yea, and one another soon after, insomuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and, if they found a plot of water-cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue therewithal; that in short space there were none almost left.98 More general references to poor fare in the same poem constantly emphasized the extraordinary thinness of the oatcakes provided by his hosts, like masswafers, and the tiny scrapes of butter with which they were spread.99 Other food he despised as lower-class, however nutritious, included goat’s milk instead of cow’s milk, goat meat, pancakes and porridge. The latter is described in one place as made by heating a container of goat’s milk with a red-hot stone and mixing in a handful of meal, presumably oatmeal.100 To drink, the poet complained he was offered bitter old wine, milk, buttermilk, stale buttermilk, a mixture of milk and water, or even water from a (stagnant) pool,101 as opposed to a well. He also makes a mysterious reference to brown soft tasteless lumps (cróinmhill boga gan bhlas),102 which O’Donovan suggests might be dumplings. If these were added to boiled meat to bulk out the dish, we may be looking at the pre-potato ancestor of Irish stew. 93 O’Donovan, The tribes of Ireland, pp 34–5, 46–7. 94 Ibid., pp 52–3, 78–9. 95 Ibid., pp 58–9. 96 Ibid., pp 44–7, 54–5, 60–3. 97 Ibid., pp 52–3, 78–9. 98 Spenser, A view, ed. Hadfield & Maley, pp 101–2. 99 O’Donovan, The tribes of Ireland, pp 42–5, 50–1, 56–9, 70–1, 74–5, 80–1. 100 Ibid., pp 34–5, 38–9, 44–5, 52–5. 101 Ibid., pp 62–5, 68–9, 72–3. 102 Ibid., pp 64–5.

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A more middle-class description of the pre-plantation diet, this time specifically in Ulster, comes in an ironic poem of advice by Eochaid Ó hEogusa to a man suffering from some internal disorder such as piles or ulcers. He started life as a cattle raider, but has been working for some time as butler, presumably in the new conditions brought about by the Ulster Plantation. The poet says the patient’s digestive problems arise from his present consumption of wine and beer, spices, fowl and whiskey. He needs to return to the rougher food of his warlike youth, and eat faoitel (whiting?) and meat that is running (with blood). He needs to lunch largely on beans with meal and yeast, breakfast on curds (gruth n-úir) and sup on cottage cheese (gruth garbh). Sweet whey (medhg milis) and coagulated buttermilk (caorbhlathach) are also recommended. In the cold of winter he should not touch soup or cáfruig (caudle?), but stick to cold milk and buttermilk. He should abandon his trousers, stride through the bogs, get as wet as a fisherman, sleep with the cows, give away his flock-bed. When he gets up in the morning, he should not put on shoes, just bend his knees and release wind from his backside, without restraint.103 The poet quotes the impressive authority of Galen and Hippocrates for his recommendations, and indeed, cutting out alcohol and increasing roughage in the diet would seem sound advice. A slightly surprising aspect of outsiders’ descriptions of life in pre-plantation Ulster is the general absence of alcohol. The passage cited above from the letter of the Armada captain Cuellar states: ‘they drink sour milk, for they have no other drink’,104 echoing Ó hEogusa’s nostalgic view of the pre-plantation diet. Bishop Chiericati, who visited St Patrick’s Purgatory in 1517, says of the Irish: ‘they live on oaten bread, and for the most part drink milk or water’.105 The pilgrim Ramon de Perellós, who attended an actual feast in O’Neill’s court in 1397, says: they do not eat bread, nor do they drink wine, for in that country there is none. However the great lords drink milk as a sign of their nobility and some drink meat-broth. The common people eat meat and drink water … The king [O’Neill] received me very well and he sent me an ox and his cook to prepare it. In all his court there was no milk to drink nor bread nor wine, but as a great gift he sent me two cakes as thin as wafers and as pliable as raw dough. They were made of oats and of earth and they were black as coal, but very tasty.106 There is a clear inconsistency in this traveller’s account as regards the availability of milk, but his reference to the delicious black oat-cakes rings true, as this seems a description of cakes of mingled oatmeal and ash, made by burning the corn in 103 ‘A dhuine na heasláinte’, ABM, no. 10, pp 6–7. 104 Above, p. 475. 105 J.P. Mahaffy, ‘Two early tours of Ireland’, Hermathena, 18:40 (1914), 1–16: 14. 106 Carpenter, ‘The pilgrim from Catalonia’, pp 109, 111.

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the sheaf as a quick way of drying and hardening the grain so that it can be milled right after reaping, a common practice in Gaelic Ireland that was made illegal by the Anglo-Irish parliament in 1634 for reasons best known to themselves.107 To be fair to the legislators, there is an anecdote in the early fourteenth-century tract ‘The Miracles of Senan’, where a woman, sacrilegiously using a deserted church to parch corn, burned the place down when a sparrow seized a burning straw in its beak and hopped back to drop it on the thatch.108 Ale, beer, bragget (a honey-flavoured beer) and mead could be manufactured domestically, and an annal entry for AD1107 suggests that bragget and mead were the festive drinks prepared for an Easter feast in O’Brien’s palace at Kincora.109 In the late twelfth or early thirteenth century the chronicler of the AngloNorman invasion, Gerald of Wales, tells us that French wine from Poitou was commonly imported into Ireland, and there are other references to French wine later in the thirteenth century.110 From the mid-fourteenth century, the Statutes of Kilkenny forbade the sale of food or drink to the native Irish in times of war, so that English and Anglo-Irish merchants required licences to export wine, among other goods, into Ulster, usually naming the harbours of Lough Foyle and Lough Swilly as their destination. It is noticeable that they sometimes described the wine they were bringing to trade for fish or hides as ‘undrinkable among the English’ (impotabile inter Anglicos),111 the ‘bitter, old wine’ satirized by Áengus na nÁer. This may be one reason why the Irish prized Spanish wine so highly, which O’Donnell in the mid-sixteenth century was said to obtain in exchange for fish.112 Anecdotes about Irish chieftains being lured into danger with the promise of wine, most famously when the English government kidnapped Red Hugh O’Donnell,113 suggest that wine-drinking in Ireland was very much an intermittent event, only taking place at aristocratic feasts and not always then, while the home-made ale was also associated in literature mainly with festive occasions. The game-changer was the introduction of whiskey, domestically manufactured aqua vitae (‘water of life’, in Irish uisce betha). Distilled alcohol was developed on the continent of Europe between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in a medical context, and the first published instructions on how to do this are found in the Consilia medicinalis of Taddeo Alderotti (d.c.1295).114 It 107 Edward MacLysaght, Irish life in the seventeenth century (3rd ed., Shannon, 1969), pp 171, 317, 336. 108 Charles Plummer (ed.), ‘The Miracles of Senan’, ZCP, 11:1 (1914), 1–35: 15. 109 Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, The Annals of Ulster to 1131, pp 546–7 (AD1107); O’Sullivan, Hospitality, p. 192. 110 Katharine Simms, ‘Guesting and feasting in Gaelic Ireland’, JRSAI, 108 (1978), 67–100: 86–7. 111 Rot. Canc. Hib., pp 172, no. 3, 181, no. 37; E.M. CarusWilson, Medieval merchant venturers (London, 1967), p. 27. 112 Cal. Carew MSS 1515–74, p. 181; Darren Mac Eiteagáin, ‘The Renaissance and the late medieval lordship of Tír Chonaill’ in Donegal Hist. & Soc., pp 203–28, at p. 207; O’Neill, Merchants and mariners, pp 48–9. 113 See above, p. 444; Simms, ‘Guesting and feasting’, p. 87. 114 R.P. Multhauf, ‘Distilled liquors’ in J.R. Strayer (ed.), Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 4 (New York 1984),

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seems probable that Irish medical students who travelled to study in Montpellier and Salamanca115 were responsible for developing a native version of aqua vitae, distilled from grain rather than grapes, at some point in the fourteenth century. The first reference to a pot still (‘one aquavite distiller called “Corkan”’) comes in a Brehon law charter dated 1453, from the area which is now county Clare.116 However it is quite clear that whiskey was not only known before that date, but was being consumed at feasts as well as for medical purposes, when we read that Richard Mag Ragnaill (or ‘Reynolds’), chief of Muinter Eolais in the Longford area, died in 1405 ‘at Christmas by takeing a surfeit of aqua vitae, to him aqua mortis’ (i.e. ‘water of death’), while the chief Tomaltach Mac Donnchada Riabach of Ballimore in Sligo met a similar fate in 1463.117 Strangely, bardic poetry has no mention of the presence of whiskey at the chieftains’ feasts. Catherine O’Sullivan makes the interesting suggestion that this was because wine was more exotic and prestigious, because it had to be imported from abroad, and was difficult to obtain, whereas whiskey was a domestic product.118 Unlike ale or beer, whiskey did not have to be consumed within a few weeks of its manufacture to taste at its best, quite the contrary, so it could be more easily stored and traded, and kept permanently on hand to treat visiting strangers.119 Richard Stanihurst, writing in 1577, has a hilarious skit on medical tracts promoting the curative virtues of aqua vitae, too long to quote in full: it sloeth age, it strengtheneth youth, it helpeth digestion … it cureth the hydropsie, it healeth the strangury, it pounceth the stone, it expelleth grauell, it puffeth away all Ventositie, it kepeth and preserueth the hed from whirlyng, the eyes from dazelyng, the tongue from lispyng, the mouth from mafflyng … the belly from wirtchyng, the guts from rumblyng … And truly it is a soueraigne liquour, if it be orderly taken.120 Fynes Moryson, who wrote of his travels across Europe, including Ireland, in the early seventeenth century, remarks: The Irish aqua vitae, vulgarly called usquebaugh, is held the best in the world of that kind; which is made also in England, but nothing so good as that which is brought out of Ireland. And the usquebaugh is preferred before our aqua vitae because the mingling of raisins, fennel-seed, and pp 219–20; see also Kelly, Early Irish farming, p. 335. 115 Mairéad Dunlevy, ‘The medical families of medieval Ireland’ in William Doolin and Oliver Fitzgerald (eds), What’s past is prologue: a retrospect of Irish medicine (Dublin, 1952), pp 15–22. 116  James Hardiman (ed.),  ‘Ancient Irish deeds’, RIA Transactions, 15 [Antiquities] (1825–8), 2–95: 51. 117 Ann. Clonm., p. 325 (AD1405). See also Ann. Conn., pp 392–3, 514–15 (AD1405, 1463). 118 O’Sullivan, Hospitality, pp 103–4. 119 Ibid., pp 55, 66, 232. 120 Miller & Power, Holinshed’s Ir. Chron., p. 20.

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other things, mitigating the heat and making the taste pleasant, makes it less inflame, and yet refresh the weak stomach with moderate heat and a good relish.121 Moryson’s reference to flavourings added to whiskey is confirmed by a comic anecdote in a poem to Máelruanaid O’Carroll (d.1536), where O’Grady, in the county Clare area, is making whiskey, and sends his servant boy into town to buy pepper and aniseed.122 Binge-drinking at feasts was an old-established habit – early Irish penitentials regarded vomiting as the defining symptom of excessive drinking, and even forgave this on the major feasts of the church’s year.123 However, regular overindulgence in alcohol does not seem to have been a widespread problem in Gaelic Irish areas before the sixteenth century, for the simple reason that there were no inns or commercial ale-houses there in the medieval period. Fynes Moryson, who travelled the country c.1600, claims he saw no ‘public inns with signs hung out’ even in Anglo-Irish towns.124 In three months, from September to November 1614, King James licensed a mass of taverns in towns across Ireland north and south, including Cavan, Belturbet, Downpatrick, Lifford and Londonderry,125 but it is hard to judge how many of these involved the legalizing of pre-existing shebeens. It may be significant that a moral poem from the early seventeenth century deploring the social harm caused by habitual excessive drinking126 uses the English loan-word ‘carouse’ to describe it. Instead of hotels there had been a network of guest-houses along the roads, where travellers could claim food and lodging without payment, some maintained by clerics or laymen as a charity, others by ‘hospitallers’ (briugaid) or poets to earn a customary exemption from taxation, and others still by newly wealthy families for prestige and public relations.127 Since the guests at these houses were paying nothing, they could not expect very lavish entertainment. The twelfth-century satire Aislinge Meic Conglinne details the worst possibilities as a supper of oatbread and ‘a small cup of the church whey-water’, bedding full of fleas, a bath-tub with the used water of the night before still in it, a fire of two damp sods of turf.128 The guest-house of the poet Eochaid Ó hEogusa (d.1613) sounds rather like a youth hostel. A young man who was sleeping there had brought his own food with him and slept with it under his pillow for security. When he found it gone in the morning he 121 Morley, Ire. under Eliz. & Jas I, p. 425. 122 Knott, Tadhg Dall, no. 34. 123 O’Sullivan, Hospitality, pp 185, 189. 124 Morley, Ire. under Eliz. & Jas I, p. 426. 125 M.C. Griffith (ed.), Irish patent rolls of James I (Dublin, 1966), p. 261. 126 Díogha gach ceirde an carrús, ‘The dregs of every craft is the carouse’, ABM, no. 172. 127  Simms, ‘Guesting and feasting’, 70–9; Proinsias Mac Cana, ‘The rise of the later schools of filidheacht’, Ériu, 25 (1974), 126–46: 131–3; O’Sullivan, Hospitality, Chap. 5. 128 Kuno Meyer (ed.), Aislinge Meic Conglinne (London, 1892), pp 10–17.

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suspected the poet’s dog had eaten it, while the poet accused him of eating it himself in the middle of night.129 As late as the mid-seventeenth century, Geoffrey Keating relates a comic tale about a wild ignorant kerne (mercenary soldier) from west Munster who had never seen a hotel (teach ósda). He joined a warship that landed in England, and in the first town he came to he was invited into an inn by the innkeeper, where to his delight the staff supplied him with any food or drink he ordered, but he was bewildered at the end of a week to be told he had to ‘make reckoning’, that is, pay the bill. Failing to do so, he and his companions were beaten up and thrown out. When he went back to Ireland he was full of praise for English hospitality, saying he had been given the best of food and drink, fire and bedding. The only fault he had to find was that when strangers were bidding their hosts goodbye, a devilish gloomy wretch called ‘MacRaicinn’ (‘make reckoning’) turned up and mishandled them.130 It is significant that Keating locates this kerne in west Munster, that is, remote from towns. Smaller Gaelic lordships in the east and midlands of Ireland had frequent contact with the Anglo-Irish towns, but the ‘Great Irishry’ of west Ulster and north Connacht was more isolated. We are told that in 1425 Brian Ballach O’Neill, chief of Clandeboy in south Antrim, went to drink wine in the town of Carrickfergus, but since the inhabitants took the opportunity to kill him in revenge for his previous raids,131 there was not much encouragement for his successors to make this a habit. Just prior to the plantation of Ulster in 1610 there was a survey made of the northern province in 1608, principally concerned with quantifying the area within each county and barony and identifying church lands that were to pass directly under the authority of King James I, as head of the Church of England. The O’Brien chieftain, Donnchad, 4th earl of Thomond, took a prominent part in the commission that presided over this report, and his court poet, Tadc Mac Dáire, still smarting from the plunder of his herds by Red Hugh O’Donnell in 1599, celebrated O’Brien’s role as a ‘high-king’s victorious circuit’ in the poem Aoidhe ó Cais ina chrích féin132 (?‘The descendant of Cas [O’Brien] has visited his own territory’). This survey provides evidence for some modernization of the economy under the last Gaelic rulers. We are told that Rudraige O’Donnell, earl of Tirconnell, had recently granted the castle of Rathmullin on Lough Swilly, together with six ‘quarters’ of land, to the Dublin merchant, Edward Arthur; that a weekly market was held at Rathmullin every Monday, and another at Killybegs every Saturday, and three more at Ballyshannon, Donegal and Lifford respectively every Thursday.133 The market at Donegal may have been 129 R.A. Breatnach (ed.), ‘A pretended robbery’, Éigse, 3:4 (1942), 240–4. For Ó hEogusa’s guest-house, see Pól Breatnach (Paul Walsh), ‘Mionannála: short annals of Fir Manach’, The Irish Book Lover, 23 (1935), 7–10: 8. 130 Osborn Bergin (ed.), Trí Bíorghaíthe an Bháis: The Three Shafts of Death, by Geoffrey Keating (Dublin, 1931), pp 117–18. 131 Misc. Ir. Ann., pp 112–13 (AD1437 [sic]). 132 ABM, no. 48. 133 [Miss Parker], ‘MS Rawlinson A 237, the

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established for some time. The Annals of Ulster record that in 1506 Domnall O’Crean (Ó Croidhean), from the Sligo merchant family, ‘an honourable conscientious merchant’, died of a fit while hearing Mass in Donegal Abbey.134 In Cavan the same survey records not only a weekly market in Cavan town every Thursday, but four annual fairs held in the barony at various locations and dates. Further fairs were held elsewhere in the county on St Patrick’s Day and on the 18 July.135 As early as 1433 the Anglo-Irish parliament had complained about the trade lost by small towns in Meath due to competition from markets held by the Irish in Cavan and Granard.136 The production of linen in Ulster and elsewhere in Ireland expanded in the course of the fifteenth century, as merchants now exported the finished cloth as well as the earlier trade in linen yarn,137 and we have the evidence of Bishop Chiericati, among others, for an increased use of extravagantly large linen shirts by the Irish themselves in this period.138 In the case of commercial salmon fisheries, and to a lesser extent trade in herring and eels, the 1608 survey makes clear these were already long established,139 as previously demonstrated by the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century licences to English and Anglo-Irish merchants to bring home salmon from the Bann, Lough Foyle and Lough Swilly, in exchange for wine, salt and fine woollen cloth.140 Tim O’Neill has associated the ‘great renewal of building and refurbishing of monastic houses, friaries and castles’ in the later fifteenth century with the greatly increased income of chieftains in the west of Ireland brought about by the herring fisheries. He explains that about the year 1450 migrating herring shoals moved from the Baltic to the North Sea, the Irish Sea and the Atlantic, attracting very large fleets of fishermen from England and Spain, who paid the local chiefs for permission to fish, land on shore and dry their catch.141 It is indeed a fact that a startling number of newly founded friaries are found springing up across Ulster in the fifteenth century, most of them Third Order Regular Franciscans.142 In the same period the residences of the chiefs themselves became gradually upgraded, from large thatched halls of wattle and daub in the late thirteenth century, to timber-frame houses of coupling-beams and oaken boards surrounded by wooden palisades in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to stone castles, largely erected in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with fortified surrounding enclosures or ‘bawns’ (Ir. badhún, ‘cow Bodleian Library Oxford’, Anal. Hib., 3 (1931), 151–218: 174, 176, 181, 190. 134 AU 3, pp 482–3 (AD1506). 135 ‘MS Rawlinson A 237’, 205, 207–8. 136 Early Statutes II, p. 43; Ciarán Parker, ‘Cavan: a medieval border area’ in Raymond Gillespie (ed.), Cavan: essays on the history of an Irish county (2nd ed., Dublin, 2004), pp 37–50, at pp 45–6. 137 O’Neill, Merchants and mariners, pp 67–8. 138 Above, p. 452 and Plate XVI. 139 ‘MS Rawlinson A 237’, 158, 161, 163, 165, 169–70, 176, 181, 184, 190. 140  Above, p. 481; O’Neill, Merchants and mariners, pp 32, 34–5, 38–43, 46–7, 112. 141 Ibid., p. 30. 142 Above, pp 320–1.

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Fig. 39 The Maguires’ castle at Enniskillen. From John Speed’s map of the province of Ulster, 1610.

fortress’), of earthworks or stone, often furnished with protective cornertowers.143 (See Fig. 39) As discussed in the earlier chapter on poets, seating arrangements inside the feasting-halls are normally described as banks or benches along the walls, and in the sagas and early law texts, these banks are said to be separated by wickerwork partitions into individual cubicles or imdada, which doubled up as sleeping compartments.144 Considerable social significance attached to persons with whom one shared an imda. For example, in 1262 Áed na nGall O’Conor, having concluded a treaty with Walter Mac William de Burgh, slept beside him that night ‘in one bed and one imda’,145 cited as conclusive proof of the perfect trust each reposed in the other, without any exaction of hostages or guarantees. Court 143 Katharine Simms, ‘Native sources for Gaelic settlement: the house poems’ in Duffy, Edwards and FitzPatrick (eds), Gaelic Ireland, pp 246–67. 144  RIA Dictionary, s.v. ‘imdae (2)’. 145 Ann. Conn., pp 138–9 (AD1262).

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Fig. 40 O’Hagan’s house in the hill-fort of Tullyhogue. Detail from Richard Bartlett, Map 5, NLI MS 2656, f. 5. Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

poets are described as seated by the shoulder of their patron at feasts, drinking from the same cup and sharing the same bed.146 Diagrams of the mythical banqueting hall at Tara show the central aisle taken up with vats, cooking spits and lampstands, or in the later Yellow Book of Lecan version, vats, fires and candlesticks, with no indication of tables. (see Plates XIV, XV). This absence of furniture is still noted in the court of Niall Óc O’Neill in 1397, as the pilgrim de Perellós noted: His table was [made of] rushes spread out on the ground while nearby they placed delicate grass for him to wipe his mouth. They used to carry the meat to him on poles. Bardic poems occasionally mention chairs, for the chief himself and some of his most honoured guests, but actual tables are not clearly referred to in these texts before the sixteenth century, when they form part of the description of the O’Donnell castle at Lifford.147 The Latin word for table, mensa, had long been borrowed into Irish, but commonly with the meaning of a wooden dish or trencher.148 Rudraige MacMahon (d.1446), who had married an Anglo-Irish wife, Alice White, was praised for possessing a set of wooden mazers or bowls (sreth masal), enough to serve a hundred guests, together with quilts in his sleeping quarters, and depictions of hunting-scenes painted or carved on the oaken panels 146 Above, pp 363–4; Katharine Simms, ‘Images for the role of bardic poets’ in Caoimhin Breatnach and Meidhbhin Ni Urdail (eds), Aon don Eigse: essays marking Osborn Bergin’s centenary lecture on bardic poetry (1912), Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, April 2012 (Dublin, 2015), pp 24–60, at p. 249. 147 Knott, Tadhg Dall, no. 5, verse 6; see Simms, ‘Native sources for Gaelic settlement: the house poems’, p. 249. 148 RIA Dictionary, s.v. ‘mías’.

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Fig. 41 Detail from depiction of Armagh, c.1600, from Richard Bartlett, Map V, NLI MS 2656, f. 3. Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

of his hall.149 His house, ‘the Citadel’ (an Chathair), is described as a ‘palace of red oaken arches’, a tall, thatched building of coupling-beams and oaken boards, located on an elevated site, inside an enclosure variously called a bawn or a rath. The nearest visual representation of what was involved might be Richard Bartlett’s drawing of the O’Hagan house inside the hill-fort at Tullyhogue, c.1602. (Fig. 40) Like MacMahon’s house, the O’Hagan residence had windows, but if the outer earthen ditch had ever been topped with a palisade, no trace of it is shown by the artist. It was a boast in one of the poems to Rudraige MacMahon that the windows in his house could open and shut, suggesting that windows of this kind were a novelty in the first half of the fifteenth century. In Bartlett’s drawing, the smaller house in the enclosure at Tullyhogue also has one or two windows, as do most smaller thatched houses shown on his maps, but in his depiction of a cluster of cottages, representing the only buildings left undestroyed in the ravaged town of Armagh (Fig. 41), only two are shown with windows, and there 149 Simms, ‘Native sources for Gaelic settlement: the house poems’, pp 252–4.

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is no sign of chimneys, such as are seen on the thatched houses he draws inside the English fortifications, Mount Norris, the third Blackwater Fort and Charlemont.150 The inescapable conclusion must be that most Irish houses were dark and smoke-filled. The much-travelled Fynes Moryson, who has an eye like a ‘tripadvisor’ for details of hygiene and cooking, states that this was true even of the houses of the upper class: These wild Irish never set any candles upon tables – what do I speak of tables? since indeed they have no tables, but set their meat upon a bundle of grass, and use the same grass as napkins to wipe their hands. But I mean that they do not set candles upon any high place to give light to the house, but place a great candle made of reeds and butter upon the floor in the midst of a great room. And in like sort the chief men in their houses make fires in the midst of the room, the smoke whereof goeth out at a hole in the top thereof … I trust no man expects among these gallants any beds, much less feather beds and sheets, who, like the Nomades removing their dwellings according to the commodity of pastures for their cows, sleep under the canopy of heaven, or in a poor house of clay, or in a cabin made of the boughs of trees and covered with turf, for such are the dwellings of the very lords among them. And in such places they make a fire in the midst of the room, and round about it they sleep on the ground, without straw or other thing under them, lying all in a circle about the fire, with their feet towards it. And their bodies being naked, they cover their heads and upper parts with their mantles, which they first make very wet, steeping them in water of purpose; for they find that when their bodies have once warmed the wet mantles, the smoke of them keeps their bodies in temperate heat all the night following.151 Apart from providing yet more testimony to the usefulness of the shaggy Irish mantle, both indoors and outdoors, and the Spartan hardiness of the Irish themselves, this account of their habit of dipping the cloaks in water and wrapping them round their heads surely refers to a counter-measure to filter out smoke from the fire while they slept. As we have seen, some of the major chieftains, even in Ulster, were living in stone castles by the date at which Moryson wrote. Richard Stanihurst, writing in 1584, remarks that although chieftains might sleep in stone tower houses, which provided better protection against being burned in their beds by an enemy, they still erected thatched wattle-and-daub halls beside the tower to provide space for seating the numerous 150 G.A. Hayes-McCoy (ed.), Ulster and other Irish maps, c.1600 (Dublin, 1964), Figs. II, III, IV, and p. 3. 151 Morley, Ire. under Eliz. & Jas I, p. 430.

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guests at their banquets. He adds that all through the night, a watchman on the roof of the tower cried out at intervals to warn potential raiders that his master would not be taken unawares.152 It is difficult to gain a realistic impression of what it was actually like to live in medieval Ulster, when the sources available to us vary wildly between unrealistically rosy descriptions from the praise-poets and avowedly hostile accounts from the conquering Tudor and Jacobean administrators. All reports point to a healthy and hardy people who spent most of their time in the open air, not merely when engaged in agricultural pursuits, or hunting, swimming or fishing, racing horses, dogs or boats, but even holding council, trying legal cases, playing chess or cards with strolling professional gamblers, listening to music, poetry or storytellers. At such open-air performances, anybody could listen in, which may be one explanation for the continued popularity of heroic tales and ballads of the Fianna in the folklore of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This periodic mingling of all classes of the population, and the moderate contrast in living standards between the highest and lowest ranks in society, led to a certain informality in the relations between upper and lower classes which is reflected in the comic tale from c.AD1500, ‘O’Donnell’s Kerne’.153 In this work O’Donnell and the other chiefs are addressed by soldiers and servants using their surname alone as title, and with the singular pronoun tú, ‘thou’, though we can see in an anonymous homily addressed to Magnus MacMahon (d.1443), lord of Farney, preserved in the manuscript Liber Flavus Fergusiorum,154 that a polite form of address, as a thigerna, ‘O Lord’ and use of the plural ‘you’ (sib), could occasionally appear in Irish, as was becoming normal in English and French. Richard Stanihurst comments: The Irishe man standeth so much vpon hys gentilitie, that he termeth any one of the English sept, and planted in Ireland, Bobdeagh Galteagh, that is, English churle: but if he be an Englishman borne, then he nameth hym Bobdeagh Saxonnegh, that is, a Saxon churle: so that both are churls, and he the onely gentleman, and therupon if the basest pesant of them nameth hymselfe with hys superior, he will be sure to place himselfe first, as I and Oneyle, I and you, I and he, I & my maister, wheras the curtesie of the Englishe language is cleane contrary.155 The maintenance across Gaelic Ireland of traditional bardic schools, variously studying Irish grammar, poetry and prose, medicine, music, religious studies and Irish customary law all through the medium of the Irish language,156 together 152 John Barry and Hiram Morgan, Great deeds in Ireland: Richard Stanihurst’s De rebus in Hibernia gestis (Cork, 2013), p. 113. 153 See above, pp 399, 467. 154 RIA MS 23 O 48 (b), f. 14v. 155 Miller & Power, Holinshed’s Ir. Chron., p. 111. 156 Above, Chaps. 9 and 10.

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with a number of studia particularia157 or small schools attached to a particular master, teaching civil and canon law, or scripture and theology, using the Latin language, however non-classical, meant that learning of a kind was widely accessible. Captain Cuellar, the survivor from the Armada wreck in Sligo, while on his way northwards, probably through Leitrim, recounts ‘that night I came upon some huts where I wasn’t harmed because there was someone there who knew Latin and, on account of the need to do so, with Our Lord’s help, we made ourselves understood by speaking that language’.158 He does not suggest here that the Irishman was a cleric, but he could have met with a lay erenagh, or steward of church lands, most of whom, according to Oliver St John, still learned Latin in the early modern period.159 Summing up his impressions, Captain Cuellar commented: What these people are most inclined to is thieving and robbing one another; so that not a day passes among them without a call-to-arms, because as soon as the people in the next village find out that in this one there are cattle or anything else, they come armed at night and all hell breaks loose and they slaughter one another. And as soon as the English from the garrisons find out who has rounded up and stolen the most cattle, they are sent in to seize them. All that these people can do is retreat into the mountains with their women and herds, for they have no other property, furniture or clothes. They sleep on the floor, on freshly cut rushes, full of water and ice. Most of the women are very beautiful, but badly turned out: they wear no more than a shift, and a shawl that they wrap round themselves, and a piece of linen on their heads which is folded several times and knotted at the forehead. They work hard, and are good housekeepers in their own way.160 It would be true to say that bardic poetry treats cattle raiding with the same kind of honourable status that other European societies attached to duelling, and Stanihurst has an interesting observation on the distinction drawn by Irish gentry between dishonourable thieves stealing cattle at night, and noble warriors raiding cattle by day.161 At the same time, allowance must be made for the fact that Cuellar experienced Ireland at the height of a civil war, with some chieftains in Connacht siding with Spain, and the rebels in Ulster, and others collaborating with the English troops.

157 On studia particularia see Henry A. Jefferies, Priests and prelates of Armagh in the age of the reformations, 1518–1558 (Dublin, 1997), pp 75–6. 158 Gallagher and Cruikshank (trans.), ‘Francisco de Cuéllar, “Letter from one who sailed …”’, p. 233. 159  Above, p. 288. 160  Gallagher and Cruikshank (trans.), ‘Francisco de Cuéllar, “Letter from one who sailed … ”’, pp 238–9. 161 Barry and Morgan, Great deeds in Ireland, p. 115.

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What is more unexpected is his commendation of Irish housewives. One indication of why he thought they worked hard comes in his remark about sleeping on freshly-cut rushes. A bardic poem from the thirteenth century makes clear that the rushes that packed the sleeping compartments during a chieftain’s feast were immediately cleared out the next morning162 (with any urine or vomit they might contain), and freshly replaced. Cutting so much rushes every day would be a back-breaking task in itself. In early seventeenth-century Leinster a poet praised the house of Alexander Grace for being ankle-deep in rushes,163 suggesting this was a sign of luxury, and presumably the ordinary labourer and his wife would not normally take the time to strew their floor every day, but it was a luxury which cost nothing but hard work. Rushes or reeds164 were also used for thatching roofs, and a number of poems praise the chieftains’ houses for their densely packed, waterproof thatch, fastened down with scollops, or thatchingrods.165 A tract on the traditional duties owed by certain families to the king of Connacht states ‘Straw for the privy (camra) and the benches and beds of Ó Conchubhair’s house are the duty of Clann Dál re Docair, and the making and the clearing of the privy as often as need be’.166 No such obligation appears in the sixteenth-century Ceart Uí Néill or ‘Right of O’Neill’, and indeed the earliest O’Neill castle, the late fourteenth-century ‘Harry Avery’s Castle’ at Newtownstewart, has ‘modern conveniences’ in the shape of two garde-robes, or latrine chutes, built into the castle walls.167 Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the material culture of Gaelic Ireland was the ubiquitous use of wickerwork for so many functions. Baskets and creels were made of willow shoots or sally rods, but more importantly woven hazel rods were employed to build wattle and daub houses, construct imdada or cubicles inside the houses, fence farms,168 build coracles (see Fig. 42) or provide a firm footing in the muddy approaches to fords, as the Irish name of Dublin, Baile Átha Cliath, ‘the town of the ford of the hurdles’, implies. Hunters camping out in the woods could make instant shelters or fianbotha169 from boughs of trees, bent over and thatched with leaves. Warring armies could ambush their opponents by ‘plashing the woods’, felling trees or weaving saplings into confining fences or barricades.170 Both in Gaelic Ireland and AngloIreland woods were systematically managed, by cutting back trees every seven 162 Williams, Poems of Giolla Brighde, no. 14, verse 6. 163 T.F. O’Rahilly (ed.), Measgra Dánta 2 (Cork, 1927), poem 58, verse 6. 164  Kelly, Early Irish farming, pp 384–5. 165 Simms, ‘Native sources for Gaelic settlement: the house poems’, pp 252–3. 166 Myles Dillon, ‘The inauguration of O’Conor’ in J.A. Watt, J. Morrall and F.X. Martin (eds), Medieval studies presented to Aubrey Gwynn (Dublin, 1961), pp 186–202, at pp 190, 198. 167 E.M. Jope, H.M. Jope and, E.A. Johnson, ‘Harry Avery’s castle, Newtownstewart, Co. Tyrone, Excavations in 1950’, UJA, 3rd ser., 13 (1950), 81–92: 84–5. 168 Kelly, Early Irish farming, p. 382. 169 RIA Dictionary, s.v. ‘fian’, COMPDS. –both. 170 Herbert Hore and James Graves (eds), The social state of the southern and eastern counties of Ireland in the sixteenth century (Dublin, 1870), p. 162 note a; Mullally, The deeds of the Normans, p. 79; Scott &

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Fig. 42 Constructing a river Boyne coracle from wickerwork. Image reproduced with kind permission of the National Museum of Ireland.

or eight years to allow for the growth of underwood, giving a plentiful supply of rods for wattling.171 Overall, the impression is of a people very much in tune with their surroundings. Their poets praise the extensive views of the landscape to be had from hilltops, the beautiful sounds of rushing waterfalls and bird-song, especially the dawn chorus.172 They have lyrical descriptions of the rare heat-waves,173 but reserve their greatest praise for patrons who show indifference to rain dripping Martin, Expugnatio, p. 41. 171 Peadar Slattery, ‘Woodland management, timber and wood production, and trade in Anglo-Norman Ireland, c.1170 to c.1350’, JRSAI, 139 (2009), 63– 79: 64–6; Kelly, Early Irish farming, p. 390. 172 Katharine Simms, ‘References to landscape and economy in Irish bardic poetry’ in H.B. Clarke, Jacinta Prunty and Mark Hennessy (eds), Surveying Ireland’s past (Dublin, 2004), pp 145–68, at pp 146–8. 173 Damian McManus, ‘“The smallest man in Ireland can reach the tops of her trees”; images of the king’s peace and bounty in bardic poetry’ in Joseph Falaky Nagy (ed.), Memory and the modern in Celtic

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on them while they sleep in the woods, or patrol the borders on frosty nights.174 Their natural hardiness was assisted by the remarkably effective protection of the shaggy Irish cloak worn by all classes, and perhaps nothing is more telling of the unreasonable hostility of the Tudor administrators to all things Irish than their desire to ban the shaggy cloak – even Edmund Spenser, who headed the movement to outlaw it, felt somewhat defensive about his own attitude, as he makes one of his characters exclaim: Since then the necessity thereof is so commodious, as you alledge, that it is insteed of housing, bedding and cloathing, what reason have you then to wish so necessarie a thing cast off ? … O evill minded man, that having reckoned up so many uses of a mantle, will yet wish it to be abandoned!175 Under James I, officers were commissioned to seize all Irish mantles and saffron shirts and imprison those defying the ban.176 It was a regulation even more pointless than the ban on parching corn in the sheaf,177 and more oppressive and distressing to the population. As a result the nation has lost all memory of how to manufacture a textile that might yet have benefited us in rainy weather nowadays.

literatures, CSANA Yearbook 5 (Dublin, 2006), pp 61–117, at pp 91–8. 174 McKenna, Book of Magauran, no. xi, verse 8; above, p. 433. 175 Spenser, A view, ed. Hadfield & Maley, pp 58–9. 176 Griffith, Irish patent rolls of James I, p. 256. 177 Above, p. 481.

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Epilogue In the introduction to this study, I referred to the invisibility of this period of Ulster history from the archaeological point of view, the oral and literary nature of the people’s culture, the strange continuation of a barter economy and lack of urbanization in the midst of a world of towns and trade, and the pride of their rulers in a way of life that contrasted with what they knew of the courts elsewhere in Europe. As noted at the beginning of Chapter 1, the dissonance between the aims of the sixteenth-century English government in Ireland and the ambitions of Irish chiefs were at their most intense in Ulster, ultimately leading to the all-out rebellion of O’Neill and O’Donnell in alliance with Spain during the Nine Years War (1594–1603), followed by the Flight of the Earls of Tyrone and Tirconnell to seek military support on the Continent, and eventually by the Plantation of Ulster. Two reasons immediately suggest themselves as to why Ulster presented such a marked example of the cultural gap between Gaelic Ireland and Anglo-Ireland. Popular beliefs in 1517 expressed this contrast in extreme terms, as Bishop Chiericati reported: ‘further to the north they are more brutish, as I have heard; they go about naked, they dwell in caves in the mountains, and eat raw flesh.’1 One was a simple question of territorial extent, isolating west Ulster from contact with the Pale. Another consideration was the transitory nature of settlement in this region. As mentioned in Chapter 13, the west of Ireland in general was more suited to a pastoral economy than a wheat-growing one, and cattle were most economically reared by a system of transhumance, where the rough mountain pastures were used for grazing in the summer, keeping the cattle away from the oat-crops being grown in the winter fields, and bringing them down to graze the stubble later in the year when the harvest was safely stored away. If, as seems to have commonly happened, not just the young people, but the whole community transferred into the hills in the summer months, ‘like the Nomades removing their dwellings according to the commodity of pastures for their cows’ as Fynes Moryson alleged, echoing an earlier comparison drawn by Ramón de Perellós,2 it would be a foolish farmer who lavished too much of his resources on a house that was going to be left empty and vulnerable to thieves for half the year. 1 J.P. Mahaffy, ‘Two early tours of Ireland’ Hermathena, 18:40 (1914), 1–16: 14–15. 2 Above, p. 489; Carpenter, ‘The pilgrim from Catalonia’, p. 111.

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But this was not the whole story. Even when houses were occupied, sudden raids, either from neighbouring Gaelic jurisdictions or from the English or Anglo-Irish military, made it advisable to be in a position to pack up and leave at short notice, as Captain Cuéllar remarked sympathetically: ‘All that these people can do is retreat into the mountains with their women and herds, for they have no other property, furniture or clothes’. The evacuation of non-combatants in the face of attack had been brought down to a fine art from earliest times in Ireland. Already in 697, St Adomnán of Iona instigated legislation to penalize attacks on non-combatants.3 In the Old Irish law tracts, every landowner was bound by the duty of ruba or rabad, that is, patrolling the passes in time of war to raise the alarm before a raid,4 and a prime duty of the élite warriors was to escort non-combatants to places of safety.5 The effectiveness of the system is seen in the retreat of Myles de Cogan from Connacht in 1177: ‘finding the countryside had been stripped of all kinds of food’,6 or the complaint of Sir William de Windsor recorded by the fourteenth-century chronicler Froissart, ‘unless they choose, there is no-one there to fight, and there are no towns to be found.’7 The incomplete conquest of Ireland kept society on a constant war footing, giving permanent employment for mercenary soldiers, and fostering admiration for a heroic lifestyle among the nobility, which at its height encouraged a barefoot dress code.8 So the question arises, did the lords of Ulster deliberately avoid economic development of their territories in order to maintain their position as being necessary for the military protection of their subjects? This was not how people wanted to live, in Ulster or anywhere else. It was one of the most striking features of Gaelic society that it maintained a hereditary learned class who were not completely dependent on either the church or the kings.9 Tracts on the duties and responsibilities of an ideal king, originating in Ireland as early as the seventh century, were still being reissued and adapted in the fifteenth by such scholars.10 According to these, a good ruler was one who imposed peace and stability on his kingdom, and ensured continuity of occupation. As we read in the Audacht Morainn: ‘it is through the justice of the ruler that every heir plants his house-post in his fair inheritance … impetuosity yields to composure … conflict yields to peace … for he whom the living do not glorify with blessings is not a true ruler’.11 It is particularly striking that a midsixteenth-century address to Domnall MacSweeney, lord of Fanad, emphasizes

3  Above, p. 409. 4  Kelly, Early Irish law, p. 31. 5  Above, p. 426; Katharine Simms, ‘Warfare in the medieval Gaelic lordships’ in Harmon Murtagh (ed.), Irishmen in war I: from the Crusades to 1798 (Dublin, 2006), pp 44–55, at pp 48–50. 6 Above, p. 25. 7 Geoffrey Brereton (trans.), Froissart: Chronicles (London, 1968), p. 410; see Simms, ‘Warfare in the medieval Gaelic lordships’, p. 44. 8 Above, Chap. 11. 9 Above, Chaps. 9, 10. 10 Above, pp 256–7. 11 Kelly, Audacht, pp 7, 17, 19; above, pp 250, 252, 262.

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the peaceful and constructive duties of a king, because the lord of Fanad was also high constable of O’Donnell’s galloglasses, so war was his trade. However, this poem seems to have been designed to celebrate the end of a succession struggle in Fanad and the confirmation of the young Domnall as unopposed ruler there: War has ended now that Fanad has found a worthy prince. Domhnall wielded an experienced axe before taking the kingdom, he does not avoid conflict since acquiring the title … Even though he need not fight now he is inaugurated, he still seeks his former reputation … He will have to abandon his trade of arming at moonrise. A feature of his title is, he may not plunder … farmers who have ploughed little, will soon be weary of it. Wine and music abound under his rule.12 It is significant that a mid-sixteenth-century poet in Ulster equated ploughing with peaceful conditions, and peace as a pre-requisite for ploughing. In 1551, the bitter succession struggle in Tír Eógain between the two sons of Conn Bacach O’Neill, Seaán an Díomais (‘Shane the Proud’), and Matthew, Baron Dungannon, had laid waste the region to the point where, we are told, no doubt with some exaggeration, there were ‘not ten ploughs’ in the country and hundreds had died of hunger in the fields.13 Nor was this simply the effect of ‘collateral damage’. It was reported that Baron Dungannon had ordered wheat to be sown on his lands to please the English government, and that his father, Conn Bacach O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, had been deliberately burning the crops, so that the people declared they would sow no more: ‘for that was the chief cause (as they said) that the Earl did destroy their corn, for bringing new things to his country other than hath been used before’.14 Destroying an enemy’s crops was a time-honoured tactic in Ulster warfare, often achieved not by burning, but by driving great herds of cattle, the creaghts or caeraigechta, onto the growing corn.15 However, Conn O’Neill seemed to harbour an objection to his own subjects engaging in agriculture even when under his authority. He was reported to have exclaimed: ‘If there were but one plough in the country … he would spend upon the same, with many other indecent words for a captain of a country to say’.16 His attitude was certainly not typical of a Gaelic chief. In 1549, Cathair mac Airt Kavanagh, of Poulmounty in county Wexford, agreed to receive what amounted to a very comfortable income from taxing the 800 or so ploughs in his district, in exchange for his earlier oppressive custom of coyne and livery, the 12 ‘Do sguir cogadh criche Fanad’ – poem no. 4 in Seán Ó Foghlú, ‘Four bardic poems from Leabhar Chlainne Suibhne’ (M.Litt., TCD, 1993), p. 141; see Simms, ‘Images of the galloglass in poems to the MacSweeneys’, p. 119. 13 Richard Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors, 1 (London, 1885), p. 362. 14 Ibid. 15 Above, p. 474. 16 Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors, 1, p. 374.

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billeting of his troops and horses on the farmers.17 Conn Bacach O’Neill’s son, Shane the Proud (d.1567), contrary to his fearsome popular image, actively encouraged farmers from neighbouring jurisdictions to enter his lordship ‘to dwell and manure in his contrie’, so that under his rule Tír Eógain ‘was never so rytch nor so inhabyted’, and this effort to improve agricultural production was continued under Shane’s nephew, Hugh O’Neill, the Great Earl of Tyrone (Áed Mór, d.1616), so that in 1597, Lord Deputy Burgh commented that the earl’s demesne lands enjoyed ‘increase of corn and cattle as plentifully as in any part of England’.18 Why then did Conn Bacach O’Neill appear to oppose the whole class of agriculturalists like a nineteenth-century cattle-rancher in the American Wild West? The correspondence of the time clearly shows that the English were promoting cereal-growing as productive of stability and a reluctance to go to war. Spenser’s description of the dire famine caused by Lord Grey’s scorched earth policy when suppressing the Munster rebellion,19 and the resilience of the rebel troops themselves, who drove herds of cattle with them on campaign and lived on the meat, milk and cheese they produced, shows how vulnerable a heavy dependence on cereals made a population in wartime. Wartime mobility was also enhanced by avoiding a reliance on castles and towns. Richard Stanihurst, writing in 1584, during the reign of Turlough Lynagh (Toirdelbach Luinech, d.1595) as Great O’Neill of Tír Eógain, argued against exaggerated accounts of the barbarism of the Gaelic chiefs: With the exception always of O’Neill, the lord of Ulster, who since he is a serious opponent of British rule, for the most part maintains permanent camps on the grassy plains, these petty kings have castles, which are strongly built and fortified with massive stonework … They do not therefore, as many men think who turn their backs on truth, wander around through all sorts of woodland tracks and bogs, but they have fixed estates and dwellings, which are crowded every day by a huge throng of guests. They are truly the most hospitable of men, and you could not please them more in any way than by visiting their homes on your own impulsive wish, or by pledging yourself as a guest at their invitation.20 The exception with regard to O’Neill once again associates pastoralism and transitory settlements with wartime conditions. It would be unjust, however, to accuse Conn and his successors of deliberately causing constant war to ensure steady employment for themselves and their soldiery. If we approach the question from their point of view, they were the victims of circumstances. 17 Hore and Graves, The social state of the southern and eastern counties, p. 282. 18 Nicholas Canny, ‘Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, and the changing face of Gaelic Ulster’, Studia Hibernica, 10 (1970), 7–35: 27–9. 19 Above, p. 479. 20 Barry and Morgan, Great deeds in

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A point, apparently voiced by Conn’s own subjects, was that O’Neill resented the sowing of wheat ‘for bringing new things to his country other than hath been used before’. Conn O’Neill had seen vast changes in his own lifetime, from a position of close alliance with the Geraldine administration in the 1520s. As a result of that alliance, he then enjoyed a leading role among the other Irish chiefs, so that even the earl of Surrey had written in 1521: ‘iff [ONeill] had come, all such Irishmen, as be at war with me, wold have be so affrayed theroff, that they wold have put their ostages in to my handes, to have kept contynewell peas unto me.’21 This prophecy was fulfilled in 1523 when all the midland chieftains ‘abided by the decision and arbitration of [Conn] O’Neill between them and the Earl [of Kildare], and O’Neill, after having made peace between them, delivered the pledges and hostages of the Irish into the keeping of the Earl, in security for the performance of every demand he made of them’. The almost symbiotic relationship between the Geraldine chief governor and Conn, his first cousin and eventually son-in-law, was then fully demonstrated, when Conn took part in the state parade through the streets of Dublin in 1524 to celebrate Earl Gerald’s re-appointment as chief governor.22 Even after the fall of the Geraldine hegemony, Conn was brought back into cooperation with the administration through the policy of Surrender and Regrant, and the grant of the title of earl of Tyrone, but he was never again to enjoy the full confidence of the Dublin government. In the fifteenth century, as we have seen, both the White Earl of Ormond, and the Great Earl of Kildare gained influence over Ulster by following the policy, attributed by an anonymous bardic poet to the twelfth-century courtier Walter Map, of ‘greasing the fattest pig’.23 In Map’s day, this would have meant bribing the richest courtier to obtain favour, since this man was obviously the most influential and successful. In fifteenth-century Ireland, the same approach meant providing armed support to enable the most powerful chieftain in Ulster to complete his control, at one time Henry O’Neill, at another Áed Rúad I O’Donnell, thus earning the paramount chief ’s gratitude and his reciprocal support for the central government. After the fall of the House of Kildare, however, the English administration followed a policy of ‘divide and rule’, or simply tried to mediate between the chiefs according to the legal niceties, especially after the recall of the more realistic Sir Anthony St Leger in 1546.24 The fall of the Geraldines, which brought about such a devastating reversal of the growing cooperation between Gaelic Ulster and the Dublin government, was not an accident of history, it was merely one example of rule by competing Ireland, p. 113. 21 Above, p. 218. 22 Above, pp 219–20. 23 Knott, Tadhg Dall, 1, p. 251; 2, p. 165. See above, Chaps. 5 and 6. 24 Ciarán Brady, Shane O’Neill, pp 28–9. On St Leger’s appreciation of the political value of bribery see idem, The chief governors: the rise and fall of reform government in Tudor Ireland, 1536–88 (Cambridge, 1994), pp 40–1.

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aristocratic factions being replaced by centralized, bureaucratic, royal régimes, supported by an increasingly important merchant class in the towns across Europe, giving rise to what historians dubbed the ‘new monarchies’ of Henry VII, Louis XI and Ferdinand of Aragon.25 In Ireland, however, the transition was mishandled, leading to decades of turmoil. Aggravating circumstances present were the adherence of England to the Protestant Reformation, while most Irishmen, including those of Anglo-Irish descent, preferred to retain their original beliefs;26 the kinship of Anne Boleyn with the Butlers of Ormond, involving the English administration in quarrels that were fundamentally factional; the O’Donnells’ preparedness to exploit such factional differences in order to gain the advantage of a connection with the Dublin government that Conn Bacach O’Neill had lost; and English anxiety over the rapidly increasing involvement of Scotland in Ulster, giving rise to fears that the chiefs there might transfer their allegiance to the Stuart kings, as indeed the O’Donnells on occasion professed to do.27 None of these problems were of Conn Bacach’s making, so his disenchantment with English rule and longing to restore former days and old customs becomes understandable. The other major reason for English concentration on Ulster was simply the unbroken extent of land under Gaelic rule in the ‘Greater Irishry’ of mid- and western Ulster and north Connacht. The Ulster lords had the greatest territorial resources and manpower at their disposal of any of the Gaelic chieftains,28 and annalists readily acknowledged the claim of the Uí Néill to political leadership over the rest of Ireland, either as heirs to the pre-eminent Ulster kingdom of Conchobar mac Nessa, or based on their ancestors’ monopoly of the Tara high-kingship.29 As the thirteenth-century poet Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide pointed out, the Southern Uí Néill could now be discounted since the establishment of the Anglo-Norman lordship of Meath, leaving only the O’Neills and O’Donnells as potential high-kings.30 It was against the background of this generally accepted convention that Tadc mac Dáire’s resurrection of the claims of the O’Brien high-kingship in favour of his patron, Donnchad O’Brien, 4th earl of Thomond, a Protestant, and a member of the king’s council in Ireland, who had participated in the survey of Ulster in preparation for the plantation,31 raised such a literary storm in the ‘Contention

25  For a critical assessment of the concept see, e.g., Steven Gunn, ‘Politic history, new monarchy and state formation: Henry VII in European perspective’, Historical Research, 82:217 (Aug. 2009), pp 380–92; on late medieval monarchy more generally, Bernard Guenée, States and rulers in later medieval Europe (Oxford, 1985). 26 Above, p. 328. 27 Above, Chap. 6. 28 Edmund Curtis, ‘The “Bonnacht” of Ulster’, Hermathena, 46 (1931), 87–105; State papers, Hen. VIII, pt 3, 1, p. 5; Cal. Carew MSS 1515–74, p. 308. 29 Above, p. 43. 30 Ann. Conn., pp 38–9 (AD1230); AU 3, pp 50–1 (AD1403); Williams, Poems of Gilla Brighde, no. 1, verse 5. 31 Above, p. 484.

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of the Bards’, a poetic pitting of the royal dynasties of the north against those of the south.32 However, the poets in this Contention wrote after a fait accompli, after the northern chieftains’ defeat at the Battle of Kinsale (1601/2), after the Treaty of Mellifont (1603) that ended their rebellion, after the Flight of the Earls of Tyrone and Tirconnell (1607) and after the Plantation of Ulster (1610). Archbishop Flaithrí Ó Máelchonaire, a member of a senchaide family of traditional historians, whose adoption of the Red Hand of Ulster in his own coat of arms reflected his commitment to the military restoration of O’Neill power in Ireland, contemptuously compared the contending bards to ‘learned dogs’, fighting over the bare rushes on the floor, when the feast has gone.33 Gaelic Ulster as they had known it was over. The régime the archbishop wanted to promote in its place would have been a very different world.34

32 Joep Leersen, The Contention of the Bards (Iomarbhágh na bhFileadh) and its place in Irish political and literary history, ITS subsidiary series 2 (London, 1994). 33 Ibid., p. 7; Cuthbert Mhág Craith (eag.), Dán na mBráthar Mionúr 1 (Baile Átha Cliath, 1967), p. 126; Benjamin Hudson, ‘At Aodh Ó Néill’s right hand: Archbishop Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire and the Red Hand of Ulster’ in Katharine Simms (ed.), Gaelic Ireland (c.600–c.1700): politics, culture and landscapes (Dublin, 2013), pp 69–77. 34 See P.J. Corish, The origins of Catholic nationalism (Dublin, 1968); Marianne Elliott, The Catholics of Ulster: a history (London, 2000), Chaps. 4 and 5.

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Index Entries in bold refer to Figures and Plates.

Ailech (Greenan Fort, Inishowen), 50, 54, 66, 70–3, 77, 165, 412, Plate V Airgialla, early federation of mid-Ulster kingdoms, from twelfth century onwards a term for the county Monaghan area, 30, 39–40, 44, 46, 48–52, 54, 56–7, 65–7, 71–3, 77–8, 80, 83–5, 87, 90, 92, 98, 103–5, 108, 118, 120, 123–30, 135, 137, 140, 154– 5, 163, 167, 169–72, 177, 179, 181, 184, 198, 209–10, 241, 244, 246, 269, 278, 301, 306, 323, 384, 420, 439, 447; see also MacMahon; O’Carroll Airthir (Oirtheara, Orior), kingdom in south-east county Armagh, 49, 72, 78, 83, 88, 102–4, 110, 118, 125, 128, 142, 205, 210, 277, 284, 303, 417; see also O’Hanlon Armagh, archbishops of: Cellach, 76 Malachy, 76–7, 288, 301, 325, 344–5 Gelasius, 79 Echdonn mac Gille Uidir, Luke de Netterville, Donatus Ó Fidabra, 302; Albrecht Suerbeer, Brother Rainaldo, 280, 302 Abraham O’Connellan, 302 Máel Pátraic Ó Scannail, 297–8, 300, 302–4, 313, 319, 348 Nicholas mac Máel Ísa, 108, 303–6, 308, 313, 418–19 Friar Michael MacLaughlin, Roland de Jorz, 113, 306, 308–9, 441 David Mac Oirechtaig, 305, 309–10, 358 Richard FitzRalph, 310–11

Milo Sweteman, 131–2, 311–13, 427–8, 438, 447 John Colton, 141, 145, 314, 358 Nicholas Fleming, 152, 373 John Swayne, 164 John Prene, 173–6 John Mey, 176, 180, 188, 324, 393 John Bole, 188–9 Octavian del Palacio, 318 Armagh, church of, 31, 48–9, 51–60, 64– 5, 69, 72, 76–7, 80, 102–4, 130–2, 141, 170, 173–6, 180, 188–9, 194, 211, 228–9, 247, 257, 269–72, 274–88, 296–318, 324–5, 329, 341, 343–5, 348, 352, 356–8, 393–4, 409, 418–19, 427–8, 435, 438, 440–2, 464, 487, 488 Armagh, coarbs of St Patrick in, 51, 59–60, 74, 76, 253, 269–72, 276–7, 279, 343, 409 Armagh county, 34–5, 40, 49, 72, 77, 83, 88, 93, 98, 102, 125, 128, 134, 142, 156, 162, 170, 173, 180, 183–4, 204–5, 209–11, 224, 247, 307, 317, 417 Armagh, primacy of, 33, 42, 59, 64, 69, 72, 74, 76, 86, 301 arts (eladain), men of art (áes eladan), 124–5, 263, 376–403, 427, 471; see also craftsmen, entertainers, learned classes: prehistoric and early medieval; historians; law; medicine; music, poets assemblies (dála, ‘meetings’, óenaig, ‘fairs’), 27, 31, 79, 239, 248, 291, 294, 354, 397, 458, 463–70, 472, 485; Fair of Tailtiu, 50, 53–4, 75, 463

543

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544 battles, 45: Athenry (1316), 113 Belfast (1433), 170 Bosworth (1485), 202–3 Caimeirge (1241), 97 Carnteel (1239), 95 Cave Hill (1468), 194 Clontarf (1014), 42, 55, 412 Cnoc an Madma (1303), 105n., 108 Connor (1315), 111, 112–13, 442 Corcumroe (1317), 114 Creeve (1296), 106, 108, 112 Crew Hill (1003), 71n. Desertcreat (1281), 396 Doire Lethan (1590), 444 Down (1177), 85 Down (1260), 97, 100, 103–4, 366, 417 Downpatrick (1374), 131 Dreich (1379), 130; Faughart (1318), 111, 309 Flodden (1513), 211 Kinsale (1601/2), 501 Knockavoe (1522), 219 Knockdoe (1504), 208–12, 421 Leth Cam (827), 51, 66 Louth (1346), 127–8 Mag Roth (637), 48, 56, 66, 73 Móin Daire Lóthair (563), 45–6 Monasternenagh (1370), 127 Pilltown (1462), 187 Towton (1461), 186 Wakefield (1460), 186 black-rent, protection-money, cís cosanta, 138, 156, 162, 164, 167, 170–1, 176, 178, 197, 267, 223, 318 Black Death, the (bubonic plague), 121, 126, 474 Book of Armagh, ninth-century manuscript, 51, 56–9, 401 Book of Rights (Lebor na Cert), 11th century text, 65, 69, 71 Brehon families, see also law: Mac Áedacáin (Keegan), 379, 391, 393 Mac Birrthagra (MacBerkery), 392–3 Mac Flannchada (Clancy), 391, 393 Ó Breisléin (Breslin), 391, 393

Index Breifne approximately modern counties Leitrim (west Breifne) and Cavan (east Breifne), 52–3, 55, 73–4, 78, 99, 110, 120, 167, 169–70, 173, 177–81, 197, 244, 247, 255–6, 265–6, 290, 324, 351, 367, 383, 395, 398, 453, 455, 460, 465; see also O’Rourke, O’Reilly Brian Boru (Brian Bóruma), Munster high-king d. 1014, 55, 59–60, 64, 68–70, 72, 74, 81, 95, 210, 244, 259–60, 386, 400, 409–12 Burgh, de Burgh, see Ulster, earls of Burke, Bourke, de Burgh, lords of Mayo, 113, 116–17, 131, 184, 187, 195, 210, 212, 219, 431, 462 Burke, de Burgh, lords of Clanrickard (approx. county Galway), 117, 162, 196, 209, 219, 369 Butler family, see Ormond Caeraigechta, creaghts, 160, 249, 474, 497–8; see also pastoralism, transhumance, cattle-raiding castles, of the Anglo-Irish, 21, 85, 88, 90–3, 99, 103, 107, 116, 118, 124, 126–7, 131, 134, 137–9, 146, 149, 156, 163, 165, 174–5, 179–82, 184, 186, 193, 197, 212, 219, 225, 229, 281–2, 332, 444, 467 castles, of the Ulster Irish, 21, 132–3, 144, 162, 168, 170–3, 175, 184, 188, 196, 198, 200, 207–9, 211–14, 219, 221, 224, 228, 322, 337, 399, 450, 466, 470, 484–7, 489, 492, 498; see houses and fortifications of the Irish cattle, see cattle-raiding, pastoralism, transhumance cattle-raiding, crech, 34, 58, 124, 158, 170, 174, 224, 372, 406, 409, 423, 424, 426, 478, 480, 491 Ceart Uí Néill (‘the Right of O’Neill’), sixteenth-century text, 243–6, 422, 492 Cell Mic nÉnain, see Kilmacrenan

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Index Cenél Múáin, see O’Gormley Cís cosanta, ‘protection-money, see Blackrent coarb, corbe, comarba, erenagh, herenach, airchinnech/oirchinneach (hereditary administrators of church-lands), 75–6, 247, 260, 275–8, 281–3, 286–90, 293–300, 308, 314–15, 319–20, 323, 353, 355, 360, 380–2, 388–9, 391–2, 394, 398–9, 491 Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh, ‘The War of the Irish with the Foreigners’, 12th century text, 55, 70, 386, 410–11 coign/coigny/coyne (and livery), coinnmed – a lord’s prerogative to billet men and horses on his subjects, 226, 430, 497 craftsmen, craftswomen, smiths, sculptors, 359n., 400–3, 440, 453–5, 457–8, 471 Cú Chulainn, mythical hero, see Ulster saga cycle Desmond, Fitzgerald earls of: Maurice fitzThomas, 1st earl (d.1356), 115–16, 122, 207–8, 362 Gerald fitzMaurice, 3rd earl (d.1398), 127, 350, 362, 367 James ‘the Usurper’, 6th earl (d.1463), 186 Thomas fitzJames, the ‘Great Earl’ (d.1468), 187, 190–2, 197, 202–3, 220 Maurice fitzThomas 10th earl (d.1520), 203, 212, 399 Devil, the, demons, Satanism, 37, 132, 295, 313, 317, 324, 326, 329, 331, 337, 340, 373, 404, 408, 415, 428–9, 465 druids, druidism, 26, 294, 322, 333, 335, 338, 359–60, 404–5, 407–8, 465 entertainers, story-tellers, reciters, clowns, 39, 226, 250, 355, 364n., 378–9n., 400–1, 447, 447, 458, 461–2, 471–2, 490

545 fairies, 61–3, 329–30 famine, 111, 115, 121, 126, 251, 253, 308, 459, 474, 478–9, 498 fasting, 273, 277, 320, 322, 326, 408, 449, 458 feasting, 42, 126, 159, 254, 261, 268, 340, 343, 354–6, 359, 363–4, 367, 369–70, 398–9, 401, 407–8, 413, 427, 432, 447, 447–9, 451–2, 458, 462–4, 466, 469–71, 475, 480–3, 486–7, 492, 501 Feast of Tara, Feis Temrach, 44, 48, 197, 254 Fermanagh, see Fir Manach and Maguire Fir Manach (county Fermanagh area), 28–30, 41, 120, 124–5, 197, 212–14, 221–2, 245, 247, 284, 337, 351–3, 356, 360, 369, 383–4, 387, 391, 394, 398, 422; see also Maguire Fitzgerald, see Kildare, Desmond food, foodstuffs, drink, 22, 25, 258, 268, 322, 326, 332, 339, 360, 364, 365n., 367, 370, 373n., 456–8, 469–71, 473–5, 478–87, 492, 498; see also wine, whiskey food-rents, tax or tribute in foodstuffs, 164, 228, 240, 243, 245–6, 306, 308, 314, 406, 422, 430, 468 Galloglasses, see mercenary soldiers Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis) 12th century chronicler, 24–5, 32, 85–6, 282, 291–3, 397, 410, 424, 481 Giraldus Cambrensis, see Gerald of Wales guest-houses, tige oíged, 64, 360, 483–4 historians, senchaide, 21, 23, 243, 245, 250, 258, 263–4, 288–9, 353, 360, 384 historians by name: Ádam Ó Cianáin, 387, 392 Cú Cóigcríche Ó Cléirig (16th century), 390 Cú Cóigcríche Ó Cléirig (17th century), 391 Lugaid Ó Cléirig, 391 Míchél Ó Cléirig, 391

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546 historians by name: (continued) Seaán Mór Ó Dubagáin, 125, 387 Fergal Muimnech Ó Duibgennáin, 381 Matha Ó Luinín, 392 Flaithrí Ó Maelchonaire, 501 houses and fortifications of the Irish, 21, 31, 52, 64, 79, 124–5, 127, 132–3, 144, 162, 168, 170, 173–5, 180, 183–4, 188, 196–200, 207–9, 211–14, 219–21, 224, 228, 235, 255, 322, 344, 356, 360, 364, 368, 371, 401, 415, 424, 448–50, 455, 459, 461, 466–7, 470, 475, 483–9, 492–6, 498; see also castles inauguration of Irish kings, sites, ceremonies, 43n. 71, 73, 126, 169, 188, 204, 213, 233, 245, 250, 253–5, 264, 291–4, 297, 306n., 356, 365–6, 465–6 Kildare, Fitzgerald earls of: Thomas fitzJohn, 2nd earl (d.1328), 115, 122 Gerald fitzMaurice, 5th earl (d.1410), 145, 182, 314 Thomas ‘fitzMaurice’, 7th earl (d.1478), 186, 188, 190, 192–3, 198–200, 318 Gerald Mór, 8th earl (d.1513), 149, 191–2, 200–12, 215–16, 229, 260 318, 403 Gerald Óc, 9th earl (d.1534), 149, 203, 213–25, 229, 241n., 499 Thomas fitzGerald, 10th earl (d.1537), 225 Gerald fitzGerald, 11th earl (d.1585), 229 Kilmacrenan (Cell Mic nÉnain), Columban church, inauguration site of O’Donnell kings, 30, 292–3, 295– 7, 343 kings, kingship, high-king (airdrí), provincial king (rí cóicid), local king (rí tuaithe), 23, 27–32, 41–4, 47, 48–50, 54–5, 59–60, 69, 94–6, 233–67

Index law, fénechas (customary Irish law), brehons (breithemain, judges of customary law), 21, 26–8, 44, 46, 58–60, 69, 102, 178, 200, 204–5, 210, 233–5, 238–43, 245, 251–3, 256–7, 272, 274–5, 286, 306, 336, 338–40, 357–8, 362, 365, 377–85, 391–4, 406–9, 421, 435, 439–41, 449, 457–8, 460–1, 463–5, 467, 471–3, 482, 490–1, 496; see also Brehon families learned classes, prehistoric and early medieval, 26, 32, 41, 60, 68, 250, 259, 268, 335–42, 377–8 Lebor na Cert, see Book of Rights livery, the billeting of horses, see coign livery, uniform or clothes marking adherence to a particular lord or faction, 189, 193 Mac Artáin, see MacCartan MacCartan, Mac Artáin, kings of Uí Echach (Iveagh, county Down), 98, 103, 112, 118–19, 142, 188–9 Mac Domnaill, see MacDonald MacDonald/MacDonnell (Mac Domnaill), galloglass commanders in Ireland, 66n., 123, 128–30, 140–3, 176, 184, 246, 312, 420 MacDonald, Mac Domnaill, Lords of the Isles, 87, 105–6, 113, 139, 149, 157, 170, 363, 443, 445 MacDonald, Mac Domnaill, Lords of the Glens of Antrim, 149–51, 157, 179, 190, 194, 199, 219–20, 224, 242, 403, 443 MacDonnell, see MacDonald Mac Gilla Muire, see MacGilmore MacGilmore, Mac Gilla Muire, kings of Uí nErca Céin, north Down: 98, 103, 112, 119, 140, 151–3, 158, 173–5 MacLaughlin, Domnall (‘High-king with opposition’, d.1121), 72–5, 82, 279 MacLaughlin, Domnall (king of Tír Eógain, d.1241), 94–5

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Index MacLaughlin, Muirchertach (‘High-king with opposition’, d.1166), 32, 77–83, 86, 89, 237, 280, 289, 296, 325, 412 Mac Lochlainn, see MacLaughlin MacMahon kings of Airgialla, 83, 98, 126, 129, 156, 306n., 323, 384, 416, 447 Echaid (d.1273), 103–5 Brian (d.1311), 104–5, 108, 241–2, 306, 418 Seaán (d.1342), 118–19 Áed (d.1344), 118–19 Magnus (d.1357), 123 Niall mac Murchada (d.1368), 128 Brian (d.1372), 127–30 Philip Ruad (d.1402), 130, 135, 140, 155–6, 312 Ardgal (d.1416), 154–5 Brian (d.1442), 154–6, 161–5, 167, 169–70, 172, 177 Rudraige (d.1446), 176–7, 439, 455, 487 Áed Ruad (d.1453), 177–81, 184–5 Feilim mac Briain (d.1466), 324 Rémonn mac Rudraige (d.1484), 198 Áed Óc mac Áeda Ruaid (d.1496), 205 Rossa (d. 1513), 209, 215 Glaisne Óc (d.c.1551), 224 MacMahon sub-chiefs, 102, 104, 169, 172, 177, 181, 263, 321, 362, 463, 490 Mac/Mág Mathgamna, see MacMahon MacQuillin (Mac Uigilin, Mac Howelyn), mercenaries, later lords of the Route, county Antrim, 110, 122–3, 143, 145, 157, 159, 161, 163, 165, 167, 170–1, 174, 176, 179–81, 183, 188–9, 193–5, 201, 223, 242 Mac Suibne, see MacSweeney MacSweeney, galloglass commanders, and lords of Fanad, Trí Tuatha and Tír Bogaine in Donegal, 105, 121, 194–5, 246–8, 266n., 316, 322, 330, 386, 420, 431, 447, 454–5, 496–7 Mac Uigilin, see MacQuillin Mág Áengusa, see Magennis

547 Magauran (al. McGovern, Mág Shamradáin) dynasty of Tellach Echach (approx. barony of Tullyhaw, county Cavan), 244, 341, 357, 367–8, 412–13n., 438, 440, 452–5 Magennis kings of Uí[bh] Echach (barony of Iveagh, county Down), 98, 152, 188–9, 210, 214, 224, 242, 312 Art na Madmann (d.1383), 130–1, 134–5, 312 Muirchertach Óc (d.1399), 135, 141–2, 152 Áed (d.1424), 41, 152–3, 156, 158, 161–2, 433 Art mac Áeda (fl. 1427–40), 163n., 174–5, 179–81 Áed mac Airt (?fl. 1495–6), 191, 205 Magennis, Prior Glaisne, of Down Abbey, seneschal of Ulster (fl. 1518), 215 Mág Shamradáin, see Magauran Mág Uidir, see Maguire Maguire kings of Fir Manach (Fermanagh), 28, 83, 126, 154, 245, 247, 327, 360, 391–2, 394, 399, 420, 472, 478, 486, 486: Donn Óc (d.1302), 108, 306, 418 Ruaidri (d.1358), 109, 118–19, 262 Philip (d.1395), 130, 438 Tomás Mór (d.1430), 147n., 154, 156, 160–2, 167, 372, 374, 427 Tomás Óc (d.1480), 167, 169–71, 184, 195–6, 263n., 324, 327, 398, 401, 448 Émonn (d.1488), 197, 388 Seaán mac Philip (d.1503), 205, 207, 403 Cúchonnacht Óc (d.1538), 223–4 Seaán mac Conconnacht Óic (d.1566), 242 Cúchonnacht Óc (d.1589) 264, 369–70, 450 Áed mac Conconnacht (d.1600/1), 266n., 384, 470, 478 Medicine, medical men, healers, doctors, 21, 332, 344, 346, 352, 361, 388–9, 394–6, 481–2, 490

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548 mercenary soldiers, galloglasses, redshanks, 45, 65, 86, 99, 106, 108– 10, 113, 119, 121–3, 126–30, 141–3, 159, 162, 164, 176, 184, 194–5, 201, 206, 213, 219–20, 228, 243–9, 266, 306, 308, 310–12, 317, 370, 377, 399, 401, 403, 410–21, 424, 426, 428–33, 442–4, 454–5, 467–8, 484, 490, 496–7; see also MacDonald, MacQuillin, MacSweeney merchants, see trade Monaghan, see Airgialla and MacMahon Mortimer, see Ulster, earls of music, musicians, 346, 368, 388, 396–400, 462, 465, 490, 497 Ó Briain see O’Brien O’Brien, Donnchad Cairbrech, king of Thomond (d.1242), 31, 93 O’Brien, Donnchad, 4th earl of Thomond (d.1624), 390, 450, 484, 500 O’Brien, Muirchertach, High-king (d.1119), 73–5 O’Brien, Toirdelbach, High-king (d.1086), 72, 436 O’Carroll, kings of Airgialla: Donnchad (d.1168), 77–8, 80, 259 Murchad (d 1189), 84–5, 87, 301 Muirchertach (d.1193), 301 O’Cahan (O’Kane, Ó Catháin), kings of Fir na Craíbe (approx. barony of Creeve), lords of Airecht Uí Chatháin, approx. north county Derry, 98, 102–4, 108, 118–19, 125, 141, 143, 161–2, 165, 169, 174n., 189, 195, 204, 213, 238, 315, 366, 374, 401, 427 Ó Catháin, see O’Cahan. Ó Cerbaill, see O’Carroll Ó Conchobair, see O’Conor O’Conor Faly lords of Offaly, 159, 166–7, 173, 184, 187, 190, 197, 215, 219–20, 222, 361n. O’Conor high-kings of Ireland, 31, 75, 78, 81, 84–6, 88, 95n., 345, 412

Index O’Conor kings of Connacht, O’Conor Don, O’Conor Roe, 30, 73–5, 80, 89, 93, 95, 99–100, 106, 113, 126, 141, 206, 210, 215, 219, 221, 257, 259–60, 330, 345, 347–8, 361n., 366, 384, 387, 401, 417, 424, 442–3, 445, 462, 464, 486 O’Conor lords of Carbury (north Sligo) and/or Sligo, 30, 113, 144, 159, 162, 169, 171, 212, 337, 367, 442–3, 445, 452, 457 O’Conors of Clan Murtagh (Clann Muirchertaig), 97, 110, 113, 121, 442–3, 452–3, 469 O’Devlin freeholders on O’Neill’s Lucht Tige or mensal lands: p. 245 Ó Dochartaig, see O’Doherty O’Doherty, Ó Dochartaig, chiefs of Ardmire and Inishowen, 88, 94, 120–1, 144, 173, 184, 238, 315, 396, Ó Doiblín, see O’Devlin Ó Domnaill, see O’Donnell. O’Donnell kings of Tír Conaill, 82, 97, 119–21, 126, 158, 233, 237, 246, 292–4, 296–7, 323, 380, 384, 387, 390, 420, 427, 431, 448, 487, 497, 500 Domnall Mór (d.1241), 94–5, 259, 348, 367 Máelechlainn (d.1247), 95–8, 106 Domnall Óc (d.1281), 100–6, 112, 227, 246, 259, 294, 297–8, 319, 348, 356–7, 441 Áed (d.1333), 105–6, 108, 113, 120, 262, 356, 442–3, 452 Toirdelbach (d. 1303), 105–6, 108–9, 259–60 Conchobar (d.1342), 120, 263, 362 Niall Garb I (d.1348), 120–1 Áengus (d.1352), 121 Toirdelbach ‘of the Wine’ (d.1423), 130, 134, 144–6, 153–4, 157–61, 315, 374, 433, 439 Niall Garb II (d.1439), 136, 154, 157–9, 161–3, 165–73, 183, 187, 194, 266, 375, 445

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Index Nechtain (d.1452), 157, 168–73, 175, 183, 194, 248, 375, 426 Rudraige mac Nechtain (d.1454), 183–4 Domnall mac Néill Gairb (d.1456), 195 Toirdelbach Cairbrech (d.1458), 195 Áed Ruad I (d.1505), 171, 187, 195–8, 200–12, 228, 260, 324, 360, 431, 499 Conn (d.1497), 206 Áed Dub (d.1537), 206, 210–21, 223–5, 228–9, 327–8, 394, 399, 467, 490 Magnus (d.1563), 203, 221, 224–6, 229, 242, 324, 328, 337, 353, 366, 369, 403, 481 Áed mac Magnuis (d.1600), 248, 266n., 372, 443 Áed Ruad II (d.1602), 227, 229, 372, 386, 390, 444, 470, 478, 481, 484, 495 Rudraige (d.1608), 238, 484 Ó Floinn, see O’Flynn O’Flynn (O’Lynn, Ó Floinn Líne), kings of Uí Thuirtre (south-east Derry, south Antrim), 87, 98, 102–4, 112, 119–20, 189, 247 Ó Gairmledaig, see O’Gormley O’Gormley (Ó Gairmledaig, Ó Gailmredaig), kings of Cenél Múáin, on Tyrone–Donegal border, 75, 77–8, 80–1, 97–8, 119–20, 144 O’Hanlon kings of Airthir (south-east county Armagh), 83, 98, 102–5, 110, 118, 119n., 128, 134, 140, 142, 156, 162, 179, 191, 204–5, 210, 284, 303, 312, 370n., 417 Ó hAnnluain, see O’Hanlon O’Kane, see O’Cahan O’Lynn, see O’Flynn Ó Néill, see O’Neill O’Neill, kings of Tír Eógain, from late 14th century called ‘Great O’Neill’, 30, 33n., 41–3,70–2, 80–3, 94, 96: Áed (d.1177), 80–1, 85, 88

549 Áed Méith (d.1230), 40, 81, 88–94, 112 Domnall (d.1234), 94–5 Brian Ruad (d.1260), 81, 94–5, 98–101 Áed Buide (d.1283), 100–7 Niall Cúlánach (d.1291), 100, 103–7 Brian II (d.1296), 106, 108, 112 Domnall (d.1325), 104–6, 108, 111–15, 158, 165 Henry (d.1347), 106, 115–16, 118–23, 141 Áed Remor (d.1364), 115, 118–28, 141, 158 Niall Mór (d.1397), 127–8, 130–7, 140–1, 158, 194 Niall Óc (d.1403), 22–3, 42, 136–47, 153, 158, 160, 187, 194 Brian Óc (d.1404), 137–8, 153 Domnall Boc (d.1232), 153–4, 157, 159–65, 169 Eógan mac Néill Óic (d.1456), 153–5, 160–7, 169–85, 188 Henry mac Eógain (d.1489), 169–70, 173, 179–81, 183–4, 186–9, 193– 201, 203, 206, 211 Conn Mór (d.1493), 196, 200–4, 206–7 Henry Óc (d.1498), 203–7 Domnall Clárach (d.1509), 201, 204–5, 207–9, 211 Art mac Áeda (d.1513), 209, 211–13; Art Óc (d.1519), 213–14 Conn Bacach (d.1559), 203, 207, 209, 212, 214, 216–21, 223–4, 226 Áed Mór (d.1616), 227; 226–9, 236–8, 242–9, 253, 255, 266, 279, 297, 303n., 305–6, 308–10, 312–14, 317–18, 324, 329, 348, 356, 362–3, 371, 374–6, 378, 383, 390, 394, 401, 417–20, 422, 424, 426–8, 433, 441–2, 445–7, 451–3, 462, 466, 468, 473, 480, 487, 495, 497–501 O’Neill, chiefs of Clannaboy/Clandeboy (Clann Áeda Buide), 96, 100, 114, 120, 123–4, 127, 153, 183, 188, 193– 6, 199, 209, 212:

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550 O’Neill, chiefs of Clannaboy/Clandeboy (Clann Áeda Buide) (continued) Brian son of Henry (d.1369), 118, 128–30 Brian Ballach (d.1425), 156–8, 160–3, 165 Muirchertach Ruad (fl. 1427–75), 167, 169–70, 173–4, 176, 179, 181–2, 189–90, 194 Áed Buide II (d.1444), 173–5, 179 Conn mac Áeda Buide (d.1482), 189–90, 194, 197, 201 Áed Óc (d.1485), 201 Áed Buide III (d.1524), 217–20 Brian Ballach II (d.1529), 223–4; 242, 247, 309, 323, 382, 484 O’Neill, Clann Airt of Omagh, 183, 188, 194–6, 198, 201, 207, 211, 213, 214n., 223–4 O’Neill, Clann Henry Aimréid, 130, 132, 134, 137, 144–7, 153–4, 157, 159, 161, 169, 171–2, 174n., 315n., 374–5, 428, 446 O’Neill of the Fews (na Feda, in south Armagh), 96, 176, 180, 184, 209, 211–13, 224, 317, 375, 426 Ó Raigillig/Ó Ragallaig, see O’Reilly O’Reilly kings of east Breifne (approx. county Cavan), 22, 33n., 99, 110, 119, 133, 140, 167, 173, 178, 180–1, 184, 197, 205, 210, 223–4, 246n., 247, 265–6, 324, 367, 383, 455, 460, 464 O’Reilly, Bishop Richard, of Kilmore diocese (fl. 1369), 311, 438 Orior (kingdom and barony name), see Airthir Ormond, Butler earls of: James, 1st earl (created 1328, d.1338), 122 James, 3rd earl (d.1405), 145, 148–50, 314, 446 James, 4th earl (d.1452), 149–50, 155, 157–88, 191, 202–4, 222, 317–18, 350, 403, 499 James, 5th earl (d.1461), 186–7, 188n.

Index John, 6th earl (d.1477), 187, 191–2 Thomas, 7th earl (d.1515), 203–4, 215, 222 Piers, 8th earl (d.1539), 215–16, 222, 224, 500 Ormond, Sir James of (d.1497), illegitimate son of John, 6th earl of Ormond, 204, 206–7, 209 O’Rourke kings of west Breifne (approx. county Leitrim), 73–4, 78, 97, 167, 169–70, 197, 367, 421, 453, Ó Ruairc, see O’Rourke pastoralism, cattle, 25, 58, 78, 102, 142, 160n., 181, 209, 238, 240, 249, 251, 262, 266, 356, 360, 366, 377n., 406, 413n., 454, 456–7, 460, 466, 473–5, 484, 491, 495–8; see also cattleraiding, creaghts, transhumance pilgrimage, pilgrims, 22–3, 42, 70, 145–6, 216, 306, 311, 314, 324–7, 348, 360, 371, 429, 446, 448, 451–2, 465–6, 475, 480, 487 poets, filid, 21, 23, 42, 124–5, 136, 159, 168–9, 174–5, 197–8, 204, 245, 233, 236, 245, 250, 258, 261–5, 288, 310, 319, 330–403, 427, 433, 440, 447, 451, 465, 483, 500–1 poets by name: Finnlag an Baird Ruad, 469 Gilla Crist Brúilingech, 372 Eógan Ruad Mac an Bhaird, 353 Fergal Óc Mac an Bhaird, 353, 370, 470 Laísech Mac an Baird, 465 Donnchad Mac an Cnáide, 369 Maílín Óc Mac Bruaideda, 478 Tadc mac Daire Mic Bruaideda, 372, 448, 500 Brian Ruad Mac Con Mide, 375–6 Conchobar Ruad Mac Con Mide, 375, 377 Gilla Brigte Mac Con Mide, 94–5, 265, 297–8, 303, 310, 319, 347–50, 352, 356–9, 361–2, 384, 418, 500 Dubthach Eolach Mac Eochada, 368

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Index Fergal Mac Eochada, 469 Eógan Mág Raith, 363 Máelmuire bacach Mág Raith, 125, 362 Áengus Ruad/na nÁer Ó Dálaig, 478–9 Donnchad Mór Ó Dálaig, 347 Gofraid Finn Ó Dálaig, 362, 365n., 368, 454 Muiredach Lesa an Doill Ó Dálaig, 348, 367, 383 Seaán Ó Fialáin, 360 Ferflatha Ó Gním, 353 Eochaid Ó hEogusa, 353, 375, 384, 470, 480, 483 Gille Brigte Ó hEogusa, 353 Domnall Cáech Ó hUicinn, 464 Fergal Ruad Ó hUicinn, 365 Gilla na Náem Ó hUicinn, 355–6 Niall Ó hUicinn (fourteenth century), 453 Niall Ó hUicinn (fifteenth century), 155 Pilip bocht Ó hUicinn, 319 Tadc Dall Ó hUicinn, 353, 448, 471 Tadc Mór Ó hUicinn, 452 Tadc Óc Ó hUicinn, 361, 363, 365, 367, 369, 468 Séumas Ó hUid, 382 Seithfín Mór, 354–5 prophecy, prophecies, 61–2, 86, 258, 294, 299, 333, 336–7, 360, 444, 478 Queens, 37, 54, 170, 173, 229, 439, 441–54 Redshanks, see mercenary soldiers Savage family of the Ards and Lecale, county Down, 123–4, 130, 135, 138–9, 142–3, 145, 148–53, 170, 179, 188–90, 193–5, 198, 201, 215 Scots, Scotland, 22, 24, 33, 46, 65–6, 68, 72, 80, 82, 84–6, 88, 98–9, 101, 103, 105–14, 115n., 116, 118, 121, 123, 130, 138, 140, 148–50, 157, 165, 170, 179, 189–90, 199, 203, 211–12, 216, 219–20, 227–8, 233, 242–3, 246, 248,

551 250, 255, 268, 273, 283, 294, 296, 306, 308–9, 326–7, 335, 345, 347–8, 351, 355, 363, 372, 383, 397, 399, 401, 403, 412, 416, 419–20, 433, 441, 443–5, 464, 469, 474, 500, surnames, 12, 42n., 54, 71–2, 188, 233–4, 249, 254, 287, 296n., 315, 318, 342, 347, 351, 355, 369, 383, 392, 396, 398–9, 401, 462, 490 Tara (Temair), prehistoric site and highkingship title, 41, 43–4, 48–55, 69–73, 75, 95, 114, 127, 197, 254, 279, 294, 336, 408, 419, 431, 487, 500 Telach Óc, see Tullyhogue. Temair, see Tara Three Collas, the, 52, 65–6, 412 trade, towns, merchants, 22–3, 25, 63, 69, 113, 121, 127, 150, 156, 159, 162–3, 170–1, 176, 189, 197, 199, 201, 208, 210, 214, 222, 224, 228, 242, 302, 307, 310–11, 318, 326, 329, 431, 453, 457, 459, 481–5, 487, 495–6, 498, 500 Transhumance, booleying, 466, 474–5, 495 Tuatha, minor kingdoms, 27–9, 236, 239–41, 244–5, 249, 252–3, 338–40, 367, 377–9, 384, 406–7, 410, 422, 436, 453, 463 Tuatha Dé Danann, ‘People of the Goddess Danu’, 63, 330–1, 333 Tullyhogue (Telach Óc), O’Neill inauguration site near Cookstown, 71–2, 90, 99, 169, 487, 488, Plate IV Ui Neill (early medieval federation of dynasties in north and midlands, ancestors of the later O’Neills, O’Donnells, MacLaughlins, O’Melaghlins and other royal lines), 33, 39, 41–61, 47, 64–72, 75, 84, 88, 94–5, 114, 183, 227, 245, 268–9, 278–9, 357, 378, 390, 409, 411, 463, 500

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552 Ulaid, population of east Ulster (counties Antrim and Down), 21n, 39, 41–9, 51–4, 56, 60–1, 66–8, 70–4, 78–80, 84–5, 87–90, 93, 95, 98, 100, 103, 112, , 137, 157, 161, 165, 173, 174n., 179, 183, 198, 245, 268–9, 301, 351, 396 Ulster, earls of (de Lacy, de Burgh, Mortimer), 33n., 84, 117, 122, 124–5, 143, 237 Hugh de Lacy, 1st earl (d.1242/3), 89–90, 92–3, 95, 98–9, 101 Walter de Burgh, 2nd earl (d.1271), 101–3, 236 Richard de Burgh, 3rd earl (‘the Red Earl’, d.1326), 102–13, 115, 119, 309, 442 William de Burgh, 4th earl (‘the Brown Earl’, d.1333), 116–19, 122–3, 237, 309, 451 Lionel of Clarence, 5th earl (d.1367/8), 123, 131 Edmund Mortimer, 3rd earl of March, 6th earl of Ulster (d.1381), 123, 131–4, 144 Roger Mortimer, 4th earl March, 7th earl of Ulster (d.1398), 134, 137–46, 148, 242, 314, 446–7 Edmund Mortimer, 5th earl of March, 8th earl of Ulster (d.1425), 148, 150, 162–3

Index Richard, duke of York, 9th earl of Ulster (d.1460), 158, 164, 175n., 180–3, 186 King Edward IV, 10th earl (d.1483), 186, 189, 192–3, 198 Ulster saga cycle, Warriors of the Red Branch, Cú Chulainn, Macha, Emain Macha (Navan Ring, county Armagh), 33–43, 48, 61, 66–7, 73, 131, 136, 260, 312, 403, 408, 427, 440n., 464, 469–70, Plate I Vikings, the Viking invasions pp. 42, 53–5, 66–7, 69–70, 72, 82, 227, 243, 409–14, 427, 459 whiskey, 480–3 White family, of Louth and the Dufferin, county Down, 135, 138, 150–1, 157n., 164–5, 167, 175, 179, 181, 188, 193–4, 198–9, 312, 446, 487 wine, 159, 163, 176, 226, 370, 448, 462, 478–82, 484–5, 497 witches, fortune-tellers, prophetesses, 61, 329n., 331–4, 336, 412, 415, 428, 430 women, their legal rights, professions, occupations, 58, 112, 118, 235, 239, 258, 265, 276n., 279, 313, 316, 320–1, 323, 331–3, 355, 370, 409, 415, 418, 426, 431–58, 466, 468–9, 481, 491, 496; see also Queens