The Old Irish World

by Alice Stopford Green

We would desire to ask Mr. Dunlop for the exact proof he relies on for any one of these statements, beginning perhaps with “no law outside the customs of the tribe.” Writers who hold Ireland to be, as he says, “a sort of scrap-heap for Europe,” and who cannot conceive of medieval Irishmen as ordinary men sharing the faults and virtues of other white Europeans, are addicted to the word “native”—a word not in common use among historians for Englishmen in England in the Middle Ages, but affected by them to indicate Irishmen in Ireland, with the derogatory sense which their “tradition” requires. The vulgar view received as it were official recognition half a century ago from Mr. Hamilton in his preface to the State Papers of 1509-73 (see also references in my book, 487-8), where he explains that the study of Irish life till Elizabethan times will be of considerable value in the study of Universal History, Ireland being so remote from the earlier seats of civilisation that the rude way of living described by Hesiod and the old poets still lingered there till the sixteenth century; till which time “most of the wild Irish led a nomade life, tending cattle, sowing little corn, and rarely building houses, but sheltered alike from heat and cold, and moist and dry, by the Irish cloak.” The last fifty years, we see, amid the general shaking of dry bones and the movement of history elsewhere, have brought no stir in Irish history. That alone stands like eternal truth fixed and unchangeable. Hence, doubtless, Mr. Dunlop’s canon (Quart. Rev., 1906) forbidding “a history of Ireland in more than one volume.”

The barbarian legend has got a long start. A first attempt to review its evidence was made in my book. In a series of social studies I have endeavoured to discuss, not the whole of Irish history, but definite matters of trade, social life, and education. I have gathered a body of facts which indicate that Ireland had considerable manufactures; that her foreign commerce can be traced throughout Europe; that there was an orderly society, even a wealthy one; that Irish travellers were known at Rome and in the Levant; that there was an Anglo-Irish culture by no means contemptible, in touch with Continental learning; and that increasing intercourse of the races did not tend to barbarism but to civilisation.

In this sketch I have not proposed to myself to draw nice distinctions between what the Normans precisely did, and what the Irish (or even, following Mr. Dunlop), what Iberians were doing in the sixteenth century in the joint work of commerce and culture, because there is as yet no sufficient material for that discussion; I share this lack of knowledge with many who have pronounced themselves with no uncertain voice. Further, I should have been glad to confine these studies to the cheerful progress of trade and culture; but I was confronted with two possible objections. The suggestion that if there had been any considerable trade it would not have vanished by a freak, could only be answered by indicating how and why the destruction had been wrought. And to meet the argument that historians would not have let a genuine story perish, I gave my opinion on how it was that the truth dropped out of sight.

My conclusions conflict with the venerable traditions over which Mr. Dunlop mounts guard. I clearly offend also against the canon of one volume. It is obvious that he must feel for me the sharpest disapproval; and this censure is conveyed with no mitigation of phrase or manner.

The charge he elaborates against me is briefly that I have no judgment, and less candour, in the use of documents, and have thus produced a mass of mischievous fiction.

I may say in passing that Mr. Dunlop’s severity with regard to authorities comes somewhat oddly from one who has shown himself fairly easy in such matters. In his own writings he gives no references, and in this same article the only authority he quotes independently is Mr. O’Connor’s Elizabethan Ireland. When I have to be silenced, “Turn we to Mr. O’Connor!” Now Mr. O’Connor has written a slight sketch of Irish political and social life in some 280 pages. He gives no dates, no indications of place, and no references. But we have Mr. Dunlop’s word for it that it is a “scholarly” work. “Mr. O’Connor” quoted by Mr. Dunlop ends controversy. The tradition is secure. I might envy Mr. Dunlop this freedom from trammels of references, of date, or of place. In such wide and impartial survey any statement about Ireland may appear as true of every place and of all time. Barbarism would seem to be a fixed and unchanging state, a passive monotony, from the time of “Lacustrine habitations” and of “Hesiod and the old poets,” till its characteristic representative in Shane O’Neill. The principle once assumed, any evidence will suffice to show that the Irish had none of the attributes of ordinary white Europeans; while evidence that they made money, traded, built houses, talked Latin, studied medicine and law, or otherwise behaved like other people of the Middle Ages, is probably rhodomontade, moonshine, or historical profligacy.

Mr. Dunlop’s summary method with unfamiliar sources appears in his asperity towards what he calls my “trivial references” to Mr. Standish Hayes O’Grady’s Catalogue of Manuscripts.

“We wonder (he says on p. 267) how many of Mrs. Green’s readers are aware that of this book, from which she has gleaned so much information—of a sort—only one copy, so far as we know, is accessible to the public, and that is in the MSS. Department of the British Museum. The book, we understand, was never published. It is still incomplete. The official copy consists merely of the bound sheets as they were printed off for proof.”

I suppose Mr. Dunlop does not mean to suggest that the value of a book is in proportion to the number of copies, or that an authority of which a single copy exists should not be quoted. In any case I can reassure him. The sheets of this Catalogue have been these many years past for sale to the public at the Museum, where I got my copy, and I hope many others did the same. The book can be bought in a London shop to-day. Mr. Dunlop might consult it in the London Library. The copy placed in the National Library in Dublin in 1895 has been in frequent use since then. Possibly Mr. Dunlop knows the inside of the book better than the outside, but it seems to be a new acquaintance, suddenly introduced and viewed with distaste. In this brilliant Catalogue we have the work of a very great authority, unsurpassed in his special learning, far beyond what O’Donovan could lay claim to; with its “information—of a sort—” it is the most important book that has appeared for many years with regard to Irish history. Another critic of Mr. Dunlop’s school, who in his remarks gives no definite sign of any knowledge of Mr. O’Grady’s work, has reproached me for referring to it “without further sifting.” But it is certain that neither of these writers who reprove me will themselves do much “further sifting” where that admirable scholar has gone before them.