K^+'^o r ^h HISTORY OF THE IRISH STATE TO 1014 MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA . MADRAS MICLBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO DALLAS . SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lt TORONTO IRELAND English Miles '.° '.° Jf y ^? From " The Maliing of Ireland."] [Frontispiece 4 HISTORY OF THE IRISH STATE TO I o 1 BY ALICE STOPFORD GREEN MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1925 COPYRIGHT /T% PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN PREFACE In this book I have brought together scattered frag- ments of early history, and thus attempted to construct for the first time a continuous and reasonable account of the Irish commonwealth down to the death of its greatest leader Brian Boru. In past times I spent many years in preparing a history of mediaeval Ireland, and endeavouring to divest myself of prejudice and ignorance. I finally realized that no such history could be rightly written until the con- ditions of Ireland itself were investigated, as revealed in the native sources, sagas, poems, annals, genealogies, and the like, which are the State Papers on the Irish side, and need as serious study as the English State Papers. " I therefore put together in " The Making of Ireland some fragments of what I had written, and set aside the mass of the rest, to make a new beginning. The last half-dozen years have been entirely devoted to this task. It was a task apparently hopeless. Nor could it have been undertaken without the aid of Dr. Eoin MacNeill, our leading guide in Old Irish history. By his fruitful labours in neglected sources such as the old genealogies, by his ingenious investigations on every side, and his new interpretations, he has opened to us roads of know- ledge hitherto unexplored, notably in the study of Irish law. With characteristic generosity he has given to me, not only encouragement, but the free use of his historical notes, published and unpublished. For his unfailing advice and criticism I owe him my sincere gratitude. I owe it to him also to say emphatically that if I have used any part of his material with lack of historic judg- viii PREFACE ment, or with undue stress or exaggeration, the error lies solely with myself. We may hope that the older Ireland will not always remain to the modern nation an unknown world. We are not without material for Irish studies. Indeed we may well marvel that, in spite of a destruction that scarcely ever ceased during eleven hundred years, so much should have survived. Since the prodigious efforts of O'Curry and O'Donovan much progress has been made, both by Irish workers and by scholars abroad. Unfortunately the results of their work remain scattered in various journals, un-coordinated, and necessarily inaccessible to most students. Our ancient records have been often badly transmitted, and sometimes only in a single version. There is still no dictionary of the older and most difficult language. Formidable errors of trans- lation have therefore been inevitable in a speech so remote and so obscure. The most valuable source of knowledge, the Laws, have under these conditions been translated in such a way as to produce a sort of quagmire where no prudent investigator has found it safe to set his foot. Grave confusion, moreover, has been caused by the use of feudal terms of law to describe the ordering of a society framed centuries before feudalism was invented. Errors and difficulties will, however, gradually be overcome. This book, though slight, is the result of years given to constant work at what often seemed an impossible task. I have not attempted to write a political history of the period, but simply to give a clear notion of the social and organized life of the Irish, their national character, culture, and laws. The methods by which the whole mass of the people were enlisted in the service of the law : the ceaseless transforming of strangers into citizens : the ancient problem of north and south : all these and many other questions, remote as they may seem to some of us, are in fact vital for Ireland after more than a thousand years. In these pages we may PREFACE ix trace the magnanimity with which Brian Boru approached such difficulties. Nothing is more evident than the admirable judgment with which the Irish chose their heroes, and the fidelity of their long national memory. It is never wrong. A. S. Green CONTENTS CHAP. HISTORY OF THE IRISH STATE CHAPTER I EARLY PEOPLES Through all ages the people of Ireland have preserved with reverence the memorials of the ancient inhabitants of their land. It is a pious remembrance of an unbroken history. The descendants of prehistoric peoples still form the leading elements of the population in Ireland, and few lands are richer in monuments of a great antiquity, and artistic work left by these first inhabitants. The peoples who created Irish civilization have bequeathed moreover a heroic tradition and Hterature, which has assured to this island an eminent place, one of singular distinction among the nations of Europe (i). Irish archaeological research is still imperfect, and we cannot tell when men first appeared on this island. Remains of human life belonging to the close of the Palaeolithic or Early Stone Age of Europe have been found as far north as Oban in Scotland, and there must have been a land connection between northern Ireland and south-western Scotland at that period, as the fauna of Ireland testifies. At Oban, as in Derbyshire and the Pyrenean region, it is the recesses of caves that have yielded the evidence of man in the late PalsoHthic times. But in Ireland the great caves of Red Bay have never been archaeologically explored, and in limestone caves stalagmite formations may conceal earlier remains of human life than have yet been identified. The first races of man that we know so far are in the NeoHthic 2 HISTORY OF THE IRISH STATE chap. Stone Age—a race of intrepid wanderers who, like the modern Eskimos, must have travelled far in their canoes, seeking food and ever changing their habitation, but always clinging to the shore where animal and vegetable life was more abundant than in the half-frozen inland desert. They fought their enemies and hunted for their food with weapons of flint, wood, and the bones and horns of animals. Their first home seems to have been on the north-east coast, where alone in Ireland flint is found, and in the flint implements found at Larne they have left the oldest signs of human handiwork in Ireland. Dwellers on the sandhills of the north coast used flint if they could get it, or made shift with local stones rudely fashioned. There probably grew up even a sort of commerce in flint, which was found in the chalk-cliffs of Antrim, from near Belfast round to Dunluce in far greater abundance than all Ireland could require. Even in our own time cargoes of flint have been shipped to Scotland, most of it gathered from the sea-shore or debris of the cHffs ; and there are tokens of very ancient traffic in the flint tools found by Dr. MacNeill in the Dun Ruad in Tyrone, where they have been gathered in great quantity. By degrees a series of communities spread round the sea-line, living on fish and trapped animals, and in course of time made their way inland by river courses and lakes, travelling in hide-covered cur- raghs, or over tracks trampled by the forest beasts. These prehistoric people may have been a western branch of the Mediterranean race ; but we know nothing of them save from the monuments they have left in Irish fields. It seems from fragments of bones and finger-prints on the old pottery that they were a small and delicately-formed people, the men on an average about five feet seven inches, the women about five feet high. The flat round-bottomed bowls for food which have been found prove their artistic sense of beauty, their feeling for line and delicate curve, and skill in working simple forms of decoration. It is supposed that I EARLY PEOPLES 3 fillar-stones may have been first set up by the NeoHthic people as sepulchral monuments ; the long reverence that attached to them may be seen in a record of the Annals of the fall in 999 a.d. of Lia-Ailbe, the chief monument of Mag Breg ; and of how Mael Seachlinn the high-king made four mill-stones out of it—whether as an act of war or defiance we cannot say. The Neolithic peoples were probably architects also of the cromlech or stone circle surrounding a central grave ; and the dolmen, a double series of huge stones embedded in the earth to form the avenue of approach and to support a gigantic slab over the tomb. The dolmen of Howth with its massive top-stone weighing about ninety tons gives some idea of the skill and the organization of these ancient peoples. The harsh conditions of the Stone Age were reHeved by a change in climate, and by the intelHgence of man. After the retreat of the ice, and subsequent uplifting of the land, the temperature rose {c. 3000 e.g.) some four degrees higher than it is now, so that it was possible to till the hill-sides for eight to twelve hundred feet higher than the present level. Life became easier, food more plentiful, movement to new homes less arduous, and winter floods less severe.