The Old Irish World

by Alice Stopford Green

But Woden’s last fight was come. The full tide of the morning carried the pagan host over the level sands to the landing at Clontarf. The army of King Brian Boru lay before them. From sunrise to sunset on Good Friday that desperate battle raged, the hair of the warriors flying in the wind, says the old chronicler, as thick as the sheaves floating in a field of oats. The Scandinavian scheme of a Northern Empire was shattered on that day, when with the evening flood-tide the remnant of the Danish host put out to sea. The work which had been begun by the fleet of Cellachan in Dundalk harbour sixty-four years before, was completed by Brian Boru where the Liffey opens into the Bay of Dublin. For a hundred, and fifty years to come Ireland kept its independence. England was once again, as in the time of the Roman dominion, made part of a continental empire. Ireland, as in the days of Rome, still lay outside the new imperial system.

Clontarf marked the passing of an old age, the beginning of a new. We may see the advent of the new men in the names of adventurers that landed with the Danes on that low shore at Clontarf—the first great drops of the coming storm. There were lords from Normandy, Eoghan Barun or John the Baron, and Richard, with another, perhaps Robert of Melun. There was Goistilin Gall, a Frenchman from Gaul. There was somewhere about that time Walter the Englishman, a leader of mercenaries from England. In such names we see the heralds of the approaching change. A revolution in the fortunes of the world had in fact opened. Scandinavian pre-eminence on the sea was even now passing away, as that of the Frisians had passed away two hundred years before. New lords of commerce seized the traffic of sea and land when the Normans, “citizens of the world,” carried their arms and their cunning from the Moray Firth to the Straits of Messina, from the Seine to the Euphrates. The Teutonic peoples that now girded the North Sea—Normans, Germans of the Hanseatic League, English—were to supersede Danes and Norwegians. Trade moreover had once more spread over the high roads of Europe, as in the days of the Roman Empire, and the peoples of the south, Italians and Gauls, had taken up again their ancient commerce.

In the new commerce as in the old Ireland was to take her full part. The island lay in the moving life that stirred the great seas, washed by that whirlpool of activity. From every shore she saw the sails of busy traffickers bearing the commerce of the known world, and carrying too its thought and art. The people had not lost their wit. They shared in the enterprise and the profit of the new commerce. The great routes were open, from Scandinavia to Gaul, and down the Irish Channel. The Danish traffic across England was not forgotten, and as the trade of the German coasts developed, busier lines of commerce were opened from the Irish harbours of the south eastward to the North Sea and the Baltic.

It is an unfinished tale I tell. But it may remind us of one gift of Nature to Ireland—the freedom of Europe by the sea. We have seen the dim figures of the flint-men, the Bronze-men, the first Gaels, reaching out hands to Scandinavia and to the Mediterranean lands. We have seen Ireland on the borders of the Roman Empire, free and unconquered, busy in trade, busier still in learning, carrying across the Gaulish Sea treasures of classical knowledge. Again Ireland appeared when the barbarians had spread over Europe, still unconquered, sending back across the Ocean the learning she had stored up, the free distributor on the Continent of the classics and science and Christian teaching. We have seen the island again on the fringe of the Scandinavian Empire, even now unconquered, and still in the mid-stream of European traffic. When a new revolution came, and trade swelled under the Normans, every Irish port was full. Irishmen sailed every sea. Their fabrics were sold in every country as far as Russia and Naples. Through the long centuries they never lost the habit of the sea and of Europe. In the middle ages Spanish coin was almost the chief currency in Ireland, so great was the Irish trade with Spain; and in the eighteenth century the country was still full of Spanish, Portuguese, and French money in daily use—the moydore, the doubloon, the pistole, the Louis d’or, the new Portuguese gold coin. So much so that in the Peninsular war Ireland was ransacked for foreign coins to send to the army in Spain and Portugal.

But that story is over. Ireland at last was swept within the orbit of an Empire—not as a free member of a federation, but in full subjection, with every advantage that complete military and police control could afford. Natural geography gave place to political geography, and the way of the Empire ruled out the way of the sea. “I should not presume,” wrote Richard Cox, Esquire, Recorder of Kinsale, in dedicating to their Majesties William and Mary a History of Ireland from the Conquest thereof, which he printed at St. Paul’s Churchyard in 1689. “I should not presume to lay this treatise at your Royal feet, but that it concerns a noble Kingdom, which is one of the most considerable branches of your mighty Empire.

“It is of great Advantage to it, that it is a Subordinate Kingdom of the Crown of England; for it is from that Royal Fountain that the Streams of Justice, Peace, Civility, Riches and all other Improvements have been derived to it; so that the Irish are (as Campion says) beholding to God for being conquered.

“And yet Ireland has been so blind in this Great Point of its true Interest, that the Natives have managed almost a continual war with the English ever since the first Conquest thereof; so that it has cost your Royal Predecessors an unspeakable mass of Blood and Treasure to preserve it in true Obedience.

“But no cost can be too great where the Prize is of such value; and whoever considers the Situation, Ports, Plenty, and other Advantages of Ireland will confess, that it must be retained at what rate soever; because if it should come into an Enemy’s Hands, England would find it impossible to flourish; and perhaps difficult to subsist without it.

“To demonstrate this assertion, it is enough to say that Ireland lies in the Line of Trade, and that all the English vessels that sail to the East, West and South, must, as it were, run the gauntlet between the Harbours of Brest and Baltimore: and I might add that the Irish Wool, being transported, would soon ruine the English clothing Manufacture.