The Old Irish World

by Alice Stopford Green

The Castle of Ardglass, showing the “New Works.”
(From Grose.)

From a few fragments we can only guess what wealth was once stored up in Lecale. Wars of Irish and English raged round a harbour so important, as the chiefs of Ulster pressed down against the strangers over a land which had once at Dun Lethglasse held a chief fort of old Ulster kings. O’Neill burned Ardglass of the d’Artois house in 1433: in 1453 Henry O’Neill of Clannaboy was driven back from the town by the help of a Dublin fleet. At the close of the fifteenth century the English almost disappeared out of Lecale. Garrett the Great, Earl of Kildare (1477-1513), claimed Ardglass and the lands about it as heir through his mother to d’Artois, and gained supremacy there—a part of the far-seeing policy by which the house of Kildare was gradually widening its influence from sea to sea, from Ardglass to Sligo and the lower Shannon. His son Garrett Oge had, by grant of Henry viii. (1514), the customs of Strangford and Ardglass, to be held by service of one red rose annually; and still after four centuries heirs of the Fitzgerald house remain at the entrance of Strangford Lough. After the revolt of this Garrett’s son, Silken Thomas (1535), the English marched through the country, burning Lecale. The fall of the Kildares, allies and relatives of the O’Neills, brought a revival of the O’Neill wars for Ardglass, and of the English campaigns. Lord Leonard Grey has left a description in the State Papers (III. 155) of his expedition in 1539: “and so with the host we set forward into the said country and took all the castles there and delivered them to Mr. Treasurer who hath warded the same ... the said Lecayll is environed round about with the sea and no way to go by land into said country but only by the castle of Dundrome.... I assure your lordship I have been in many places and countries in my days and yet did I never see for so much a pleasanter plot of ground than the said Lecayll, for the commodity of the land and divers islands in the same environed with the sea which were soon reclaimed and inhabited....”

It was in this “reclaiming” that the Deputy ravaged the east coast, took Dundrum, and the castles of Lecale and Ards; profaned S. Patrick’s Church at Down, turning it into a stable and destroying the monuments of Patrick, Brigid, and Columcille, and “after plucked it down, and shipped the notable ring of bells that did hang in the steeple, meaning to have them sent to England: had not God of his justice prevented his iniquity by sinking the vessel and passengers.” Queen Mary restored Ardglass to the next Earl, Gerald, son of Silken Thomas, the boy who at his father’s capture had escaped “tenderly wrapped” in a turf-basket, and after long perils and sorrows and exile in Rome, Italy, and France, had at last returned, an obedient Angliciser under the Catholic queen (1553). Under Queen Elizabeth, who was in Irish belief illegitimate and a usurper, Shane O’Neill (1558-1567) cast out the English, and “forcibly patronised himself in all Lecale.” Ardglass seems to have come into the hands of the Irish, and trade was busy, for in Shane’s great cellars at Dundrum he was said to have commonly stored two hundred tuns of wine.

Thirty years after Shane’s death (1597), a plan for out-rooting the Irish and planting an English race was drawn up by a clergyman of “the Church of Ireland,” James Bell, Vicar of Christ Church in Dublin, and dedicated by him to Lord Burghley. He was the faithful representative of a political establishment, deep-stained with the blood and sorrow of the Irish. Here is his proposal, preserved in the British Museum: “The Crown should divide the land into lots of 300 acres, at £5 yearly rent, for English undertakers, who should maintain 10 men (English) and 10 women, who now live in England by begging and naughty shifts; while single to have two acres, married, four acres of the 300—which was to be circumvallated by a deep trench or fosse.... If upon Tirone’s lands 2,000 English families be planted, her Majesty’s profit would at once be £10,000; besides, having 4,000 soldiers at hand without pay, for every two of the ten men should serve in turn three months each year—the act would be motherly and honourable for her Highness. To the bishops, there should be given, in fee simple, 1,200 acres, at £20 a year, upon every 300 acres of which the ten men and women are to be maintained, upon the like conditions; the inferior clergy, down to parson and curate, to have 600 acres upon proportionate rent and service. If her Majesty’s heart be moved by this device, there shall not be a beggar in England; a work of great profit, great strength, and great glory to the Queen, great love to her subjects, and singular mercy towards her meanest subjects, in that she giveth house and lands in Ireland to those that, in England, have not a hole to hide their heads in. The trench round about would barr Irish rebels coming suddenly trotting and jumping upon the good English subjects.” In the proposed commonwealth no room for sustenance was left for the Irish people of the land, fenced off from every place of food. Loyal to her Majesty, James Bell was yet more loyal to the material predominance of his Church. Among farmers owning three hundred acres with ten families of labourers, the Church of Ireland was to have a stately position with its inferior curates owning twice as much as their best neighbours, and the bishops four times as much. It was but an act of gratitude. “I will not say as Joshua and Caleb said, if the Lord have a favour unto us; but I will say, the Lord having a special love unto us, God hath given Ireland to her Majesty—a country most sweet, most wholesome, and most fruitful to dwell in; so full of springs, so full of rivers, so full of lakes, so full of fish, so full of cattle, and of fowl, that there is not a country upon the face of the earth more beneficial to the life of man.”

Thus plans of settlement and plantation were abroad when Mountjoy led his army over Lecale. The castle of Dundrum surrendered to him (1601). “His Lordship ... rode to Downpatrick, and thence by St. Patrick’s Well to Ardglass, being six miles, in which town two castles yielded to the Queen, and the warders, upon their lives saved, gave up their arms. A third castle there had been held for the Queen all the time of the Rebellion, by one Jordan, never coming out of the same for three years past, till now by his Lordship’s coming he was freed.” This was the castle on the port, which was evidently provisioned from the sea, the only stronghold left in Ardglass for the English, and called Castle Jordan from its defender. After this subjection of Ardglass, Sir Richard Morrison, with five hundred foot and fifty horse, was left at Downpatrick as governor of Lecale, while Mountjoy carried on war against Tyrone.

A picture of life in a Lecale castle at this time has been left to us by Captain Josias Bodley, of Mountjoy’s army. From Armagh to Newry he journeyed through a famished country where for a whole year Chichester’s and Morrison’s troops had been employed in completely devastating the land, so that O’Neill should get provision neither for man nor horse; and the poverty he saw in Newry shows their success. Thence skirting the Mourne Mountains he stopped at the island stronghold of Magennis in the lake at Castlewellan, and passing through a land of ancient cromlechs and souterrains, of earthworks ringed and conical, and of early Norman castles, entered Lecale. The scene of the final merry-makings, the Governor’s Castle at Downpatrick, was probably the fort which stood at the foot of the hill, the last remains of which, a tall square tower, were removed a few years ago. It was evidently not unlike the castle at Ardglass, and life was the same in both of them. The stairs led first to the guard-room, with its dresser laden with dishes, and a wide fire-place where heavy pots hung from iron crooks, and cooks were busy with interminable cooking of the fish and fowls and game for which Lecale was famous, pasties of marrow and plums, Irish curds, and other dishes from France, there designated “Quelq’ choses” (“kickshaws”), which were reckoned “vulgar” by the English officers, as being perhaps too little substantial. Thence the stairs led to the large hall where in the huge fire-place logs were burning, even as in Castle Shane of Ardglass to-day, “the height of our chins, as the saying is.” The hall was comfortable, for of a night one may sit in the Ardglass room with the unglazed windows in the thick walls on every side, and the door open to the winding stairs, and no flicker of candles betrays a draught: the wind seems carried up the turret staircase through the roof. The company in the hall amused themselves with smoking, cards, backgammon, and dice. There was much drinking of healths—many political pledges no doubt as in modern Ulster, bitter tests to Irish companions when the English officers might call on a newly-submitted chief such as Magennis to join in a “loyal” toast: Bodley had apparently taken part in some scenes of scruple and silence on the part of honourable men, “of all things the most shameful,” he says. For any special entertainment the servants crowded into the same room as the masters—the cook’s wife, the scullion, and all; and played to amuse them a game still common in the north. There came, too, the Irish Mummers or Rhymers, making their Christmas rounds with torches and drums, wearing the traditional pointed caps, and carrying their profits in the base money, one part of silver to three of brass, which Elizabeth forced upon Ireland in favour of her avaricious Treasurer there, Sir George Carey. Of this money, such as it was, the Rhymers were “cleaned out” by the officers in a game of dice, and sent on their long walk home across Lecale two hours after the winter midnight, “without money; out of spirits; out of order; without even saying ‘Farewell’”—a strange contrast to the old Irish welcome to travellers and wandering players—a gallant hospitality at the Christmas time of English officers, for whom no season of mercy was sacred, and no obligation of honour, straight dealing, or courtesy binding so far as Irishmen were concerned. The rhymers may have sung as they took their way the fame of the hero-warrior of their people: “Were but the brown leaf which the wood sheds from it gold, were but the white billows silver, Finn would have given it all away.” They may have recalled the lament of the old Irish poet who saw the havoc made by “outlanders” of the ordered hospitality of Irish society. “At the end of the final world [there will be] a refuge to poverty and stinginess and grudging.” They could not see in the far future the open castle of Ardglass.

Cards, dice, drinking, and smoking filled up the time of the English visitors, with strolls of curiosity to the Wells and Chair of St. Patrick at Struel, or the huge entrenchments of Celtchair of the Battles. For the night there was a single sleeping-room above the hall, a bed-chamber “arranged in the Irish fashion” with a good and soft bed of down for the owner, and thin pallets thrown on the floor for the company. The dogs of Captain Constable shared the room with the rest, after the Yorkshire manner, leaping on the down bed and howling at their rejection.

When Morrison left Downpatrick there came Captain Edward Cromwell—descendant of Thomas Cromwell, minister of ill-fame to Ireland under Henry viii.—to be Governor of Lecale (1605): “this son of earth and foul spot on the human race,” by whose army the cathedral of Down was burned, and in that conflagration sacred monuments and very ancient writings; and many other churches too, very few of which have been since then restored. The very tombstones were used in building houses and fences; while the people watching lamented the devastation of what had been to them and their fathers “the place of their resurrection,” so that they might go in the fellowship of their saints “to the great assembly of Doom.” To Edward Cromwell the people gave the name “Maol-na-teampull” for his impiety, and numbers of men born in that terrible year of ruin reckoned their age over sixty years after from the days of his sacrilege, as if from a national visitation. In those days perhaps the Irish inhabitants were driven off the fertile land to the very rim of the sea, to set their cabins, as may still be seen, on the last refuge of the shingle itself round the Dundrum bay, or to cluster together on some bare crag.