Part 23

The galloglass chiefs obtained grants of land for their support. About a fourth of the whole territory of Tir Conaill was held by the three MacSuibhnes. Besides these principal names, many less prominent surnames, especially in Ulster, are of galloglass origin.

The events hereinafter related are drawn from the Annals of Ulster mainly.

In 1264, the year after Hakon's death, Aodh Buidhe O'Neill, who succeeded Brian as king of Tir Eoghain, extended his sovereignty over Oriel. After his time, the kings of Tir Eoghain take the title of kings of Ulster.

1265. The kings of Connacht and Tir Conaill join forces and destroy the castle of Sligo.

1267. Murchadh MacSuibhne is captured by the Earl of Ulster and dies in prison. He is the first of his surname in the Irish record.

1269. Roscommon castle built by the viceroy D'Ufford, and Sligo Castle rebuilt.

1270. The king of Connacht defeats the Earl of Ulster (lord of Connacht), and next year destroys the castles of Teach Teampla, Roscommon, Sligo, and Áth Liag; and the year after, 1272, he destroys the castle of Rinndown. This king of Connacht was the same who joined in offering the sovereignty of Ireland to Brian O'Neill in 1258.

In 1278, Donnchadh O'Briain, king of Thomond, defeated the Earl of Clare at Quin. His father had been taken three years earlier by the same Earl of Clare and put to death by being drawn asunder by four horses.

In 1286, Ricard de Burgh, the Red Earl of Ulster, comes to the front with a sustained effort to recover power in Ulster and Connacht. Several times he forced a king of his own choosing on Tír Eoghain in place of Domhnall O'Neill, son of Brian of the Battle of Down. Domhnall, however, time after time recovered the kingship, and held it until his death in 1325.

1289. De Birmingham is defeated by the Irish of Offaly, under their king, Calbhach O'Conor.

1290. Toirdhealbach O'Domhnaill, "with the help of his mother's kindred, the MacDonnells of Scotland, and many other galloglasses," deposes his brother and makes himself king of Tir Conaill. This is the first mention of galloglasses by name and also of the MacDonnells as galloglass chiefs, in the Annals of Ulster, but the context indicates that the word was already in established use.

1291. The Red Earl exacts the hostages of Connacht and harries Tir Conaill.

1292. FitzGerald of Offaly rebuilds the castle of Sligo and takes the king of Connacht prisoner. Next year, this king, having got free, destroys the castle of Sligo.

1295. Geoffrey O'Farrell destroys three border castles of Meath. The O'Farrell territory was at this time a small part of the present county of Leitrim. It was gradually extended after this until it comprised the county of Longford in addition. Longford takes its name from Longphort Ui Fhearghail, "O'Farrell's camp," a name significant of the new military organisation.

1305. Sir Piers de Bermingham caused three of the Irish ruling family of Offaly and twenty-nine nobles of their people to be murdered at a banquet to which he had invited them in his own castle. For this he received a reward in money from the Viceroy and Council, with the consent of Ricard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster.

In the same year, the Earl of Ulster built a castle in Inishowen, no doubt with a view to commanding Loch Foyle and hindering the landing of galloglasses. It may be noted that the Irish name of Milford Haven, a little farther west, is Port na nGalloglach, "the port of the galloglasses." This year we find a MacSuibhne in command of galloglasses in Breifne.

1307. Donnchadh O'Ceallaigh, king of Ui Maine, in retaliation for the burning of his town of Ath Eascrach, attacks Roscommon, kills a great part of the defenders, and captures the Sheriff.

1308. The Foreigners of North Connacht are defeated by the Irish at Ballysodare.

1310. Geoffrey O'Farrell marches against Donore Castle in Westmeath, and Ruaidhri, king of Connacht, attacks the De Burgh castle of Bun Finne.

1315. At the instance of the northern Irish, Robert Bruce, having himself declined to accept the sovereignty of Ireland, sends his brother Edward to Ireland at the head of a strong expedition.

Now that we have reached this point, it is fairly evident that the Bruce invasion, so far from being the origin or cause of the Irish reaction against Feudalism and the English sovereignty, was itself a consequence of that reaction. Notwithstanding several great victories and successful marches through the country, Edward Bruce showed himself incapable of any constructive policy. His victories were more than counterbalanced by the crushing defeat of the western Irish at Athenry and by his own defeat and death at Fochairt, near Dundalk, in 1318. The northern annalist, in chronicling this event, makes it plain that the Irish of Ulster who suffered least during the invasion, knew no reason to grieve over its ending. This is his record of the event:

1318. "Edward Bruce, the destroyer of Ireland in general, of Irish as well as Foreigners, is killed by the Foreigners of Ireland through strength of fighting at Dundalk, and along with him are killed MacRuaidhri, king of the Hebrides, and MacDomhnaill, king of Argyle." In the previous year, the same annalist tells that Robert Bruce came to Ireland to aid his brother in expelling the Foreigners, and brought with him many galloglasses. It may be noted that the purpose, "to expel the Foreigners," is identical with that proposed half a century earlier by the Irish embassy to King Hakon. The failure of Edward Bruce, after a campaign of four years, must have restored some of the lost prestige of the Feudal colonists. On the other hand, the Irish of Thomond, by the defeat and death of Ricard de Clare, rid themselves of invasion.

We come now to the next event which has been described as the turning point in the fortunes of the great struggle. In 1326, the Red Earl died, having recovered all that he had lost in East Ulster from Bruce's occupation, but not all in the same condition as before. He was succeeded by his son, the Brown Earl, William de Burgh. A feud arose among the De Burghs, and the young earl captured his kinsman Walter de Burgh, and starved him to death in the Red Earl's new castle of Inishowen. Death by starvation in prison is so frequent an incident of the Feudal _regime_ as to suggest that these magnates obeyed the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," by allowing God to allow their enemy to die, themselves not interfering. The event shows that, despite the Bruce invasion, the old earl held on to his isolated fortress among his Ulster enemies. The kinsmen and friends of Walter de Burgh avenged his death by assassinating the young earl near Carrickfergus. He died without male heir, his sole child, an infant daughter, became by law the ward of the king of England, who made her over in marriage, with the titular lordships of Connacht and Ulster, to his son Lionel, duke of Clarence.

Sir John Gilbert, in his history of the Viceroys of Ireland, writes soberly and judiciously. He has one weakness. Just as Mr. Orpen revels in grants of land, which he takes to be the bedrock of civilisation, and therefore declares to have been no structural element in the Irish polity, attaching to them a sacred efficacy of which neither Henry II. nor John nor their grantees in Ireland appear to have been fully sensible; so Gilbert revels in details of court procedure, and overloads his book with them: to be excused, perhaps, on the ground that he is writing the history of a court not of a country and people. Gilbert does not regard the Bruce invasion as a deciding factor in the attempted conquest; but he does attach this character to the demise of the Feudal lordships of Connacht and Ulster from the great house of De Burgh, resident in Ireland, upon a branch of the Plantagenets, absentees in England. He pictures to us the De Burgh chiefs forthwith abandoning their allegiance to the English sovereign as lord of Ireland and at the same time suddenly adopting the language, laws, customs and manners of the Irish; and the other Feudal lords infected by their example. We may readily believe that the titular dominion of the De Burgh earls over Connacht and Ulster had been a strong incentive to urge them to complete the conquest of those provinces, and the Feudal authority exercised by the earls, backed up by the power of the viceroys, furnished military resources which might conceivably have sufficed for such a conquest. It is further probable that Feudal law, so far as it could subject the De Burghs to the dominion of an absent prince, found little favour with them. There is no evidence forthcoming that the De Burghs in the fourteenth century were more reverent than De Prendergast, De Courci, or the De Lascis of the invasion period in their interpretation of the obligations of Feudal allegiance. Their loyalty was measured by the power and prestige of their overlord, so far as he could make it felt. The decline of the Feudal regime was as much cause as effect of the estrangement of the De Burghs from the English interest. As for any sudden change of language, we must bear in mind that the "Anglo-Normans" of the invasion did not speak English. So far as their language was not French, it was Welsh, with a mixture of Flemish. There was not much use for any of these languages in Connacht, where the De Burghs and other Feudal settlers led Irish armies and intermarried with Irish families. In short, the sudden and deliberate turning Irish of the De Burghs, after they had killed off their last earl, seems to be no better than a fantastic inference. Instead of adopting any common counsel or common policy, the De Burgh chiefs, after the Earl's assassination, engaged in violent warfare against each other.

From this time on we can trace the gradual and rapid spread of the galloglass organisation in various parts of Ireland; and this continues until the time of Elizabeth who employed galloglasses on her own side and rewarded their chiefs with grants of Irish land. Meanwhile resurgent Ireland began to assimilate her "Old Foreigners." In 1374, the annalist, recording the death of Jenkin Savage, says that "he leaves poetry an orphan." This foster-father of Irish poetry was of the family of old Sir Robert Savage who said "a castle of bones is better than a castle of stones," Feudal lord of the Ards in East Ulster.

The year after his death, 1375, a second battle of Downpatrick was fought. The Irish were commanded by Niall O'Neill, great-grandson of "Brian of the battle of Down," so little were the Irish of that age daunted by the apparent disasters of their forefathers. The Foreigners were commanded by Sir James Talbot of Malahide. O'Neill was victorious. Talbot fell in the fight. The battle put an end to the Feudal dominion established over East Ulster by the valiant de Courci. Of this fact we have a striking proof in the succession of bishops to the sees, then separate, of Down and Connor. From De Courci's time until the second battle of Down, during two centuries, no man of the Irish nation had been allowed to hold either bishopric. Soon after this, we find appointed bishop of Connor a man named O'Lúcharáin, and Irish surnames become very frequent in the clergy of both Down and Connor.

In 1384, Niall O'Neill attacked and destroyed the fortress of Carrickfergus, and (says the annalist) "obtained great power over the Foreigners." In 1392, the Feudal colonists of Dundalk submitted to him. In the record of his death in 1397, he is entitled "king of Ulster."

About this time, Eoin MacDomhnaill, brother to Domhnall of Harlaw, king of Argyle and the Islands, acquired the Feudal title to the Glens of Antrim through marriage to the heiress of Biset. Having taken possession, the MacDonnells did not concern themselves about Feudal duties to an overlord, an Earl of Mortimer or an Earl of March. Afterwards, in the official language of the Elizabethan government, the MacDonnells of the Glens were intruding Scots: a point of view which their chief, Somhairle Buidhe, countered bluntly by proclaiming that "plainly the English have no right to be in Ireland."

In the fourteenth century and still more in the fifteenth, the Irish built castles for themselves and took possession of many castles built for their subjugation. They turned the policy of incastellation against its proprietors and patentees. In this they were facilitated by the galloglass organisation, always ready for military service. The principal family of galloglass chiefs, the MacDonnells, had for their heraldic motto "Toujours prêts"--"always ready." In this period, too, a number of the old petty kingdoms, after long abeyance under Feudal lords, once more emerge into prominence.

In 1423, the Irish of Tír Eoghain and Tir Conaill, aided now by the Irish of East Ulster, defeat the viceroy, the Earl of Ormond, at Dundalk. In 1425, the Earl of March, heir to the lordship of Ulster and Connacht, is sent to Ireland as viceroy and receives the formal submission of the Ulster princes. This does not count for much, for in five years time Eoghan O'Neill, son of the king of Ulster, received in his father's name the allegiance of O'Farrell, king of Annaly, O'Connor, king of Offaly, O'Molloy, king of Fir Ceall, O'Melaghlin, titular king of Meath, and other Irish rulers in the midlands; also of Nugent, Baron of Delvin, the Plunkets, the Herberts, and the Foreigners of Westmeath in general. This, in the year 1430, marks the highest point of power reached by the kings of Tir Eoghain at any time. On his father's death in 1432, Eoghan O'Neill, says the annalist, "went to Tulach Óg, and was there inaugurated king on the stone of the kings by the will of God and men, of bishops and chief poets."

In the year following, 1433, Margaret, daughter of O'Carroll, king of Eile, and wife of O'Connor, king of Offaly, held those two festivals for the learned of Ireland that have been justly described as national events of high and singular importance, proving that the Irish of that time acted on a clear and definite consciousness of nationality. It should however, be made plain that Margaret's achievement marked no new expression of the national consciousness, either in conception or execution. Eighty-two years earlier, in 1351, what we may call a fair of Irish learning was held by William O'Kelly, king of Ui Maine, in his own territory.

A contemporary account of O'Kelly's assemblage has been left us by one of his guests, Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh, official poet to MacCarthy, king of Desmond. Miss Knott, who has edited the poem in _Ériu_,[4] says properly that these assemblies of the learned under Irish rulers had a political import: the poets fulfilling in that age a function proper to the journalists of our time.

The poet makes the occasion clear. O'Kelly had regained power in his ancestral territory, long under the control of the Foreigners, whom he had expelled, and was about to divide it again among his own people. In celebration of his good fortune, he offers a Christmas feast to all the men of learning and art of his nation: to the seven orders of poets, to the jurists, the historians, musicians, craftsmen, and jugglers also and jesters. Wide avenues were laid out with lines of conical roofed houses of timber and wickerwork: a street for the poets, one for the musicians, one for the chroniclers and genealogists, one for the rhymers and jugglers. These structures are compared to the letters on a page, O'Kelly's castle to the illuminated capital letter at their head. Craftsmen are busy carving animal figures on its oakwork. It is in the midst of a rich country, re-conquered by O'Kelly. On its bounds are Athenry, Athlone, and Athleague, three famous fords. "Loch Derg, a cause of pride, Loch Ree with its green marshes, these blue bays on which the sun shines brightly are the boundaries of William's land." Before William's ancestors, the land belonged to the hero Goll MacMorna and his brethren. It is a country of plenty, with every variety of surface, tillage and grasslands and forest. "We men of learning have come through evil days--the time of conquest and disruption--our lore neglected, our affluence reduced, most of our country against us; but a better time has come. Our host to-night has delivered us from sorrow."

[Footnote 4: "Eriu," vol. V., page 50.]

It was among a people once more confident of the future that a congress of this kind was planned and successfully held. The poet bears witness that the king's invitation has brought together a concourse from every part of Ireland, from Ulster, Thomond, Desmond, Leinster and Meath. The annals tell us they came away well pleased. Could any event be more typical of a conscious and constructive national idea?

In 1387, Niall Ó'Néill the younger, in the reign of his father, the victor of Downpatrick, built a hostel for the learned of all Ireland in Eamhain Macha, the site of the ancient home of the kings of Ulster. Margaret O'Carroll's great festival of the learned in 1433 was thus the third such occasion within three generations, noteworthy above the other two in this respect among others, that it revived the fulness of national tradition on the very borders of the Pale.

The true beginning of the Irish rally was in the minds of those kings and nobles and fighting men of Thomond and Connacht who marched to the Erne in 1258 to offer the headship of the free Irish to a king of Tir Eoghain. Both O'Brien and O'Connor were closer in the line of descent to kings of Ireland than O'Neill was. There was no country in Europe at that time whose magnates were not willing to have civil war rather than abandon plausible claims to sovereignty. From this worthy beginning I have traced the progress of resurgent Ireland down to a worthy fruition, the generous homage of an Irish queen to that literary tradition which, as Mrs. Green has so clearly shown us in a recent work, is the most characteristic element in Irish nationality. And there I leave the story.

Another time of dark adversity came afterwards. What stands for the history of Ireland in that dark time is mainly the history of a government which nobody pretends to have been Irish. We need a new history from the fifteenth century onward, written out of the records of the Irish people. But as I have set down the Irish rally as the subject of this lecture, I may properly be asked how this resurgent movement ended. I shall go as near as I can to imitate the brevity of Sir Robert Savage. The Plantagenets invoked Peter, the Tudors invoked saltpetre. When the Plantagenets undertook to become missionaries in Ireland, and incidentally to pay Peter's Pence, as Giraldus says, out of the profits, they were under the impression that Irish kings had control of secret gold mines. When Elizabeth's ministers professed a yearning to bring the Irish to civility, they were calculating how much land could be acquired by the expenditure of the stock of saltpetre available from time to time at so much per ton. It may shock the proper sense of the "Ireland under" historians that this villainous substance should be blown betwixt the wind and their civility, but just as the true keynote of what is called "Ireland under the Normans" is incastellation, so the true keynote of "Ireland under the Tudors" is gunpowder. There is more mental profit in one fact of this kind than in the painful perusal of stacks of State papers, evidence mainly against those who write them.

I must say that Irish history in the diatribal stage afflicts me much less than Irish history in popular handbooks. This lecture has not exhausted the subject from the time of Brian O'Neill to the time of Margaret O'Carroll--less than two centuries. I claim to have shown evidence of real life, growth, development, purpose and spirit in the Irish nation during that time. Take up one of these popular handbooks and what will you find? The dissensions of the Irish clans, Edward Bruce's invasion, the perpetual Statute of Kilkenny, and how Richard II. fared in Ireland. Much is made of the Statute of Kilkenny, as though its oppressive operation were a necessary consequence of its record on the Statute Book. The Irish dissensions are gravely deprecated. They are the whole history of the nation during all this period, and one example is given as sufficing for all. It tells how Godfrey O'Donnell, after his fight with FitzGerald near Sligo, returned to Tir Conaill never to recover from his wounds; how Brian O'Neill used the occasion to invade Tir Conaill; how O'Donnell had himself borne on a litter at the head of his forces, routed O'Neill, and died in the hour of victory. All this story indeed is related in a Latin chronicle of uncertain date and the place of battle is not mentioned. The contemporary Annals of Ulster are the most copious and minute record for that time of the affairs of Tir Eoghain and Tir Conaill, having been written not far from the border of the two territories. They say nothing about an invasion of Tir Conaill or about any battle or hostility between the two kings. They relate the death of O'Donnell in these words only: "_quievit in Christo_"--"he fell asleep in Christ," the customary formula of the obit of a churchman or of a layman who died in religious retirement in a monastery. This leaves the romantic battle story open to question. Whether the story be truth or fiction, when it stands with Edward Bruce, Richard II., and the Statute of Kilkenny, as a representation of Irish history during the period with which this lecture is concerned, it is not the truth of history. Not indolence nor want of access to the materials produces popular history of this sort. It is the product of a peculiar obsession of mind, that makes Ireland appear a sort of hotel, in which the important people are always distinguished visitors, and the permanent residents, when they are not under orders, are occupied with quarrelling children and other household worries in the garret or the basement.

I have said in a former lecture that the "clan system," or, as some prefer to say, the "tribal system," of medieval Ireland, is a modern notion and is an illusion. Its basis is found in the prominence given in Irish literature to the aristocratic kindreds and in the Irish custom of naming territorial divisions by the names of the septs to which their lords belonged. From this has arisen the notion that the sept or clan from whom a territory was named was the people of the territory. The illusion has been enlarged by the loose use of the term "tribe," which quotation has shown applied to a family group consisting of the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of one man; the same term being applied to an ancient aristocratic kindred like Dal Cuinn, spread over nearly half of Ireland. Common tenure of land by a family group, necessitating redistribution of the land as new generations come forward, with the use of the term "tribe" to denote such groups, has created the further illusion of a tribal territory held in common and periodically redistributed. These things being illusions, I am reminded that I have not endeavoured to set out the facts in their stead.