Part 10

It is not, however, for the Conquest only that this knowledge of the true state of Ireland ought to be acquired. The light it throws on the Irish people, their inherited and unchangeable tendencies, is of value from the parallel it presents to the latest modern developments. “Tribes and nations,” writes Mr. O’Grady, “had ceased to count”; the struggle was one in which, “released from all control,” some half a dozen rival kings “fiercely battled like bulls for the mastery of the herd.” No lively imagination, surely, is required to see the spirit of this strife renewed in the leaders of the present Irish party, or prophesy a revival, under Home Rule, of the days when “Turlough O’Conor and Tiernan O’Rourke were terribly at war--Ireland (the chronicler adds) a shaking sod between them.” Although, in the true Hibernian spirit, Mr. Standish O’Grady can speak of this as a “vast and bloody, but not ignoble strife,” I hold that its animating spirit was an ambition as ruthlessly personal as that which leads the Presidents of South American Republics to wade through blood to power, and to reduce their country to ‘a shaking sod’ for the gratification of their rivalry. It is the absolutely personal character of this strife which is fatal to Mr. O’Grady’s argument that a strong ‘Ardriship,’ or central rule, was in actual process of evolution before the invaders arrived. Where that rule was based only on personal prowess or strength of character, it was liable, at any moment, to be broken up by death, and once more replaced, if not by anarchy, at least by such internecine strife as has been the fate of Mr. Parnell’s party since the removal of his strong hand. There was, as Mr. O’Grady is never tired of reminding us, but one way, in those halcyon days, of securing the hegemony of Ireland: “a normal Irish king had to clear his way through the provinces, battle-axe in hand, gathering hostages by the strength of his arm”; he had to “move forward step by step, battle-axing territory after territory into submission.” The only vote known was given by “the mouth of the battle-axe”; and for the dissentient Irishmen of the time there were “always ready battle-axes and trained troops of swift raiders and plunderers.” Nor was it necessary for the Irish king to set his “trained plunderers and cattle drivers” at work on every occasion. The convenient and recognised institution of hostages provided him with some one he could hang or blind without the least trouble, and thus anticipate the fate which might very probably be his own.

Remember the glories of Brian the brave, Though the days of the hero are o’er.

Even the danger of interference from without could not permanently unite the Irish among themselves. The Scandinavian settlers had turned this weakness to account by siding now with one and now with another of the factions, and had finally made good their possession of the seaport towns, where they stood towards the rest of the island much like the Ulstermen of to-day, a hardy race of alien origin and long of hostile faith, merchants and seamen to whom the natives left all the traffic with other lands. One cannot but think from the small part they seem to have played in the struggle between the Irish and the Norman invaders that their heart was rather in trading than in war, and that the old wiking spirit had flickered down among them, or at least found a new vent. Not so with the Norman adventurers. That marvellous people had as yet preserved their restless activity, their boundless ambition, and their love of martial enterprise. Conquerors, courtiers, or crusaders, they were always lords in the end; the glamour of lordship was ever present above the Norman horizon. Ireland alone knew them not, and thither they had now begun to cast eager eyes. The wave that had spread itself over England and Wales had now gathered up its strength anew, and the time had come for it at last to break on the Irish shore.

It is at this point that the curious poem Mr. Orpen has so ably edited comes to our aid as an historical authority of singular value and importance. Although long known to scholars from Michel’s publication of its text (1837), it was described by Mr. Dimock, who knew its value, in the preface to his edition of Giraldus, as then “in great measure useless” from the want of competent annotation. He observed with truth that “no more valuable contribution, perhaps, to the history of the first few years of the English invasion of Ireland could be made” than a worthy edition of this poem. Such an edition Mr. Orpen may justly claim to have produced. The corrupt and obscure condition of the text demanded elucidation no less urgently than the Irish names with which it teems required special knowledge for their correct identification. It is not too much to say that Mr. Orpen has shown us how much can be done by skilful editing to increase the value of an authority. Avoiding the over-elaboration that one associates with German scholarship, he has provided his readers with an apparatus at once sufficient and concise. Text, translation, notes, map, chronology, and glossary, all are admirable in their way; and the patience with which the barbarous names, both of places and of persons, have been examined and explained is deserving of warm praise. As to the way in which a text should be treated scholars will generally differ in certain points of detail, but Mr. Orpen’s method shows us, at least, the exact state of the text from which he worked. There is still room, perhaps, for further conjectural emendation. For instance, in the lines--

Crandone pus a un barun, Ricard le flemmeng out anun--

where the editor is fairly baffled by ‘Crandone,’ perfect sense might at once be made by reading--

Slan donat pus a un barun,

which would satisfy at once the conditions of metre, of locality, and of the context. So too, in the interesting Lacy charter printed on page 310, the editor might have detected in Adam de ‘Totipon,’ the Adam de ‘Futepoi’ of Giraldus, and the Adam de ‘Feipo’ of the poem: in records the name appears in both forms. The case of this man, one may add, is peculiarly interesting, because I have detected him as a knightly tenant of Hugh de Laci in England in the returns of 1166, in which he seems to be disguised as “Putipo.” He thus came, we see, to share in his lord’s greatness, becoming one of the leading ‘barons’ in his new dominion of Meath.

It is necessary to explain that although this poem, in the form here preserved to us, dates only from about 1220 to 1230, it enshrines materials contemporary with the actual invasion and conquest. For it is based upon a narrative which seems to have closed not later than 1176, and for which the _trouvère_ or compiler of the poem was indebted to Maurice Regan, the interpreter, and, one might almost say, the diplomatic agent of king Dermot, whose matrimonial adventures were the _causa causans_ of the whole story. In giving to the poem the name of “the Song of Dermot and the Earl,” the editor has brought out the fact that its narrative is chiefly concerned with the doings of Dermot and his son-in-law, ‘Strongbow,’ as the earl of Pembroke has been commonly named.[341] It is not improbable that the original work was only carried down to the earl’s death in 1176. Mr. Orpen lays special stress on the fact that there are but “two allusions pointing to a much later date,” and claims it as “a remarkable fact that, with the exception of these two allusions ... there is nothing, so far as I have observed, pointing to a later date than 1177.” He would seem, however, to have overlooked an allusion to John de Curci’s subsequent troubles in Ulster in the lines:

De curti out anun iohan, Ki pus isuffri meint [a]han.

This, however, like the other two, would be only an addition by the later versifier, and does not affect the main fact that we are dealing with a metrical version of a story contemporaneous with the conquest, and enshrining in ll. 3064–3177 “the only connected account of the subinfeudation of Leinster and Meath ... that has come down to us, a sort of original Domesday Book of the first Anglo-Norman settlement.” As such, it has the advantage of date over the ‘Expugnatio’ of Giraldus; it is also instinct with evidence of native local knowledge; and, above all, it stands apart from any other authority in its independent point of view. Giraldus wrote, as is well known, largely with the object of glorifying his relatives, who made the invasion of Ireland almost a family undertaking; in Regan, on the other hand, we have the panegyrist of Dermot and the earl of Pembroke, who carried to such a height the spirit of party faction as to denounce as “traitors” all his countrymen who were opposed to Dermot and his foreign allies.

The opening lines are, unfortunately, imperfect and so obscure that the nature of the materials from which the _trouvère_ worked and the exact share in their authorship due to Regan have been, and must remain, to some extent matters of conjecture. Mr. Orpen himself inclines to the belief that Regan supplied the unknown _trouvère_ with a tale already “put into metre”; but Dr. Liebermann has rightly urged the improbability of our poem being merely an adaptation of one previously composed. Indeed, that eminent scholar has advanced a theory of his own, namely, that the real original source was a “lost chronicle” about the conquest of Ireland which Giraldus Cambrensis had used in 1188 for his Expugnatio.’ And this theory he bases on some striking parallel passages.[342] To the few typical parallels adduced by Dr. Liebermann I would myself add some taken from the stirring tale of the saving of Dublin when, mad for revenge, the ousted Northmen assembled from all the isles of the north to regain their lost dominion. This sudden upleaping, for a moment, of the old wiking flame was but a splendid anachronism: like the Highland rising of the ‘forty-five,’ it was curiously out of date. Yet the old Scandinavian spirit, if dulled among the traders of Dublin, still burnt in the hardy rovers they had now summoned to their aid; and the Irish chieftain who stood aloof watching with his men the surging fray as the little band of Anglo-Normans strove to repel the onslaught, saw not merely rival conquerors, quarrelling, like vultures, for the spoil, but deadly foes whose own lives hung on the issue of that fight. But while in a fit of ‘berserker’ fury, ‘John the Mad’ led the attack against the eastern gate, Richard de Cogan, the governor’s brother, had privily sallied from another one:--

Este vus Johan le deue Duce Johanne agnomine Vers dyuelyn tut serre, the Wode ... viri Vers la cite od sa gent bellicosi ... ordinatis En dreite la porte del orient, turmis ad portam orientalem * * * * muros invadunt. La cite unt dunc asaillie.

Then, marching round till he reached the rear of the assailants, he fell on them suddenly with a mighty shout, and the Northmen, caught between his brother and himself, wavered at last in their attack. The Danish axe still whirled in the hands of ‘John the Mad,’ cleaving its way, as of old, through helm and coat of mail:

De une hache ben tempre Militis quoque coxa ferro Cosuit le ior un chevaler utrinque vestita uno securis Que la quisse lui fist voler; ictu cum panno loricæ præcisa. Od tut la hache de fer blanc Lui fist voler la quisse al champe.

But John himself fell at last; and the sons of the wikings fled to their ships. Hasculf, their king, captured alive, hurled at his captors words of scorn, and was by them promptly beheaded, “pur son orgoil e ses fous dis,” or, as Giraldus tersely puts it, “insolenti verbo.”

If Dr. Liebermann’s theory be accepted, it would involve, as he reminds us, the important consequence that we have in our poem and the ‘Expugnatio’ not two independent authorities, but narratives drawn from a common source. The discrepancies, however, between the two are so numerous and so significant that we cannot accept this new view as at all satisfactorily proved.

But turning to a third source of information, known as “the Book of Howth,” I have no hesitation in saying that its nature has been quite misunderstood. It is difficult to render clear, within a short compass, the hopeless confusion that surrounds the subject, and that is, virtually, all to be traced to an error of that ardent collector, but most untrustworthy antiquary, Sir George Carew, whose voluminous MSS. at Lambeth include both the ‘Regan’ poem and the Book of Howth, and to whom we should have felt more grateful if he would only have left them alone. But the worst offender was Professor Brewer, whose work it is the fashion to rate very highly indeed, though I have found it by no means unimpeachable even in his calendars of the state papers of Henry VIII.[343] Now the Professor ought to have been quite at home on this Irish subject, for it fell to his lot to edit the first four volumes of Giraldus as well as the Book of Howth; yet he not only stereotyped and carried further Carew’s original error, but found fault, somewhat unjustly, with Mr. Dimock’s remarks in his preface to the ‘Expugnatio.’

The real facts of the case are these. So popular were the works of ‘Master Gerald,’ as Mr. Dimock observed, that they survive, not only in many MSS., but in several early translations. The pedigree of these translations has not been properly worked out. At Trinity College, Dublin, we have two in E. 3, 31, and F. 4, 4, while at Lambeth we have the so-called ‘Conquest of Ireland’ by Bray--published by Messrs. Brewer and Bullen, with the Book of Howth--and in the latter (pp. 36–117) there is included another and more modernized version. Of these the one assigned to Bray was held by Professor Brewer to have been written about the end of the 14th or beginning of the 15th century, and to be “so interesting and curious a specimen of English as spoken in the Pale” that he decided to print it in full and to retain the original orthography. But E. 3, 31 was, he admitted, “a still earlier version.” Yet this latter MS., when submitted by Mr. Dimock to so competent an authority as Mr. Earle, was pronounced by him to be “a truly interesting specimen of fifteenth (_sic_) century Hibernian English.” He added that it well deserved publication, in which remark I certainly concur, its language being most curious. Professor Brewer (p. xxiii.) declared it “an error” of Mr. Dimock and others to term this MS. a translation of Giraldus, but the real error, we shall find, was his own. The other Dublin MS. (F. 4, 4), to which he does not allude, is assigned by Mr. Dimock to “the sixteenth century” (p. lxxvii.), and declared to be “a transcript from the earlier E. 3, 31,” a description which, unfortunately, misses the point. The solution, I believe, of the whole mystery is that there was a very early and exceedingly free translation of Gerald’s ‘Expugnatio,’ which, after the mediæval fashion, spoke of him at times in the third person, and thus assumed, in places, a quasi-original form. This original translation, which seems to be now lost, was copied both by the writer of E. 3, 31 and by Bray in his ‘Conquest of Ireland,’ the latter only modernizing somewhat the language. Then come the two other MSS., both of the latter part of the 16th century. Of these the distinctive feature is that while still copying, though further modernizing, the original translation--for internal evidence seems to prove that the Book of Howth at least was derived from neither of the above copies--they interlard it with certain passages taken from another and distinct source. This discovery, which corrects Mr. Dimock and overthrows the conclusions of Professor Brewer, is based on collation of the essential passage in the Book of Howth with its parallel passage in the Dublin MS. F. 4, 4 as given in Hardy’s ‘Catalogue of Manuscripts relating to the History of Great Britain,’ on the authority of Mr. W. M. Hennessy:

BOOK OF HOWTH. TRIN. COLL. MS. F. 4, 4.

This much Cameransse left out This much Camerans left out of in his book aforesaid with other his book ... with other things things, more for displeasure more for displeasure than any than any truth to tell, the truth to tell, the cause before cause afore doth testifie. God do testifie, God forgive them all. forgive them all. This much that This much that is in this book is in this book more than more than Camerans did writ of Camerans did write of was was translated by the Primet translated by the Primate Dowdall in the yere of o^r Lord Doudall in the year of our God 1551 out of a Latin book Lord 1551 out of a Latin book into English, which was found into English, which was found with O’Neil in Armaghe. with O’Nell in Armaghe.

Nothing can be more clear than this reference to the interlarded portions, which can all, I may add, be identified and separated from the ‘Giraldus’ portion. But Carew carelessly wrote, in the margin on fo. 6, that the _whole_ narrative “was translated out of an old book of O’Neale’s written in Latin, and put into English by Dowdall, Primate of Ardmaghe, beginning in anno 1167.” Though Professor Brewer had the words of the original before him, and though he could not but admit that Bray “follows closely the footsteps of Giraldus,” yet he was so misled by Carew’s unlucky slip as to assert that the MS. E. 3, 31 was “nothing more than a translation of the Latin chronicle once in O’Neil’s possession, which Carew calls ‘the Conquest of Ireland, written by Thomas Bray’” (p. xxiii.). These, on the contrary, are precisely the versions which have no interpolations from that source. The Armagh book was devoted to the deeds of John de Courcy, Conqueror of Ulster, though, by a crowning error, Professor Brewer was careful to distinguish it from “A Chronicle of the Gests or Doings of John de Courcey, Earl of Ulster.” Apart from the interest of its contents, the “book” has a special importance from a significant allusion by Giraldus, when closing his chapter on John, who was never, by the way, “Earl of Ulster”:

Sed hæc de Johanne summatim, et quasi sub epilogo commemorantes, grandiaque ejusdem gesta suis explicanda scriptoribus relinquentes, etc., etc.

Having now cleared up all this confusion, I need not dwell on Professor Brewer’s further failure to detect the share taken by Christopher lord of Howth in the compilation of the book that bears the name of his house, but will resume our discussion of the Anglo-Norman poem.

Although, as I have said, the nature of the materials supplied to this 13th century _trouvère_ must remain as yet conjectural, the question is of some literary interest in its bearing on the relation of the ‘Carmen Ambrosii’ to the ‘Itinerarium Peregrinorum,’ if not to the chronicle of Richard of Devizes, in which cases, by a converse process, we find a French poem utilized by a Latin chronicler. It is the plausible suggestion of M. Paul Meyer that the _trouvère_ to whom we owe this poem composed it by desire of the countess of Pembroke, daughter of the earl, and granddaughter of Dermot, just as the great ‘Marshal’ poem, now in course of publication, was written for the glorification of her husband’s family.[344] That the writer was a Pembrokeshire man is rendered extremely probable by his evidently close acquaintance with that district, and his recognition of the Flemish element in ‘little England beyond Wales.’ A curious test of his accuracy is afforded by his mention of the king’s departure for Ireland:

Li rei henri, quant eskipa, A la croiz en mer entra.

It is a warning to the critical school of historians that Miss Norgate very naturally supposed the poet to have here mistaken Crook, in Waterford harbour, where Henry disembarked, for the place where he took ship. Mr. Orpen has shown conclusively, from records, that the ‘croix’ was the usual place of embarkation for those leaving Pembroke for Ireland. We have thus a peculiar feature of the poem in its combination of the Irish knowledge possessed by the original informant with the acquaintance of its later versifier with men and places in that district from which the adventurers had so largely come.

Among the points on which this poem gives us special information we may note its mention of a man who played no small part in the royal administration of Ireland.[345] We read that, on the coming of king Henry,--

Willame le fiz audeline Od lui vint a cel termine (ll. 2603–4).

Belonging to the same type as the men whom the first Henry had steadily raised to office and to power as a check upon the turbulent feudal nobility, William was called upon to play a similar part in Ireland as the representative of the royal power among the eager adventurers who had flocked to the land of promise. Hence their bitter complaints against his rule to the king, and the violent criticism of his personal character to which Giraldus gave utterance from the point of view of his kinsmen. Now Professor Tout rejects the statement, in the two lines we have quoted, that William came with the king, and infers from the ‘Gesta’ that Henry had despatched him some time before from Normandy to govern till he came. But there is evidence--though unknown, it would seem, to historians--that throws fresh light upon the question. Mr. Eyton, in his ‘Court and Itinerary’ of the king, could not discover any document belonging to his stay at Pembroke (29th September to 16th October), while waiting to cross to Ireland. It was there, however, on the 7th of October (as the date is, in this case, given) that he granted a charter to the men of Maldon,[346] from which we learn that with him at the time were the earls of Cornwall and Clare (Hertford), Roger Bigod, three of his ‘dapiferi,’ or household officers, William Ruffus, Alvred de St. Martin, and William Fitz Audelin, with two men, Hugh de Gundeville and Robert Fitz Bernard, whom he took with him to Ireland and left there. It is clear then that if William Fitz Audelin and Robert Fitz Bernard met him on landing at Waterford, they can only have preceded him, at most, by a few days. This discovery vindicates the virtual accuracy of the poem.

Mr. Eyton’s work, to which I have referred, records (p. 165) another charter of interest for its date. It belongs to Henry’s stay at Wexford, in March, 1172, on his way back to England. As only the first two witnesses were known to Mr. Eyton, a full list may here be appended as illustrating the king’s _entourage_ on this expedition.

Testibus; Comite Ricardo filio Gilberti; Willelmo de Braosa; Willelmo de Albin[eio];[347] Reginaldo de Cortenay; Hugone de Gundevilla; Willelmo filio Aldelini dapifero; Hugone de Cresy; Willelmo de Stotevilla; Radulfo de Aya (_sic_); Reginaldo de Pavily; Radulfo de Verdun; Willelmo de Gerpunvilla; Roberto de Ruilli; Apud Wesefordam.[348]

Turning now to other subjects, one of the most curious allusions in this poem is that which refers to the practice of tendering a folded glove as a gage for waging one’s law. Maurice de Prendergast is accused of treason in protecting the king of Ossory from the perfidy of his foes:

E Morice a sun guant plee, A son seignur lad baille, Quen sa curt ad dressereit De quant quil mespris aueit. Asez lunt replegeez De vassals engleis alosez.

So, too, when Robert Fitz Stephen was brought as a traitor before king Henry:

Le fiz estephene pleia sun guant Al rei le tendi meintenant: De quantque lui sauerat retter Lui vodrat robert adrescer En sa curt mult uolenters Par la garde de tuz sez pers. Asez le plegerent errant Franceis, flamengs e normand.