The Old Irish World

by Alice Stopford Green

I do not propose to weary the reader by multiplying instances of this kind. The details of historical controversy interest few readers. Its personal aspect should interest none. The instances I have given are true samples of all the rest. I have gone carefully through the long indictment, and I note half a dozen minor points in which I am glad to correct an obvious misprint or to amend an error (not one of which, I would say, affects the drift of my argument). But the great bulk of these criticisms—grave inaccuracies in themselves, or misstatements of what I say, or dogmatic assertions which need for their discussion evidences which there is no attempt to offer—can give me little help. For an example of historical investigation of medieval Irish history, of serious use of references and evidences, or of customary fairness in discussion, I must go elsewhere than to Mr. Dunlop.

With regard to evidence, I am charged with repudiating the testimony of Spenser, Davies, Fynes Moryson, Cuellar, Derrick, and official documents that tell against me. I have drawn very largely from State Papers and official records of all kinds, sources of information which have proved invaluable for my purpose. In the shaking bog of medieval testimony, some firm standing is to be found in statutes, ordinances, town records, cartularies, and the like. From them we rapidly come to more perilous regions—State Papers and letters—where every document needs to be considered as a separate “source” to be separately discussed. Some were written by strangers newly come to the country—soldiers, secretaries, adventurers, spies; others by higher officials struggling in an intricate tangle of intrigues, or by a lower sort trying to make their way upwards; some by governors zealous to keep their credit amid the scandal of the Court; others by governors desperate to recapture a lost reputation. In the medley of partiality, prejudice, ignorance, despair, and triumph, every one must judge to the best of his ability as to the value of the testimony; there can be no scientific accuracy in the measurement. There is the same difficulty with the reports of a few Continental travellers, Italian or Spanish. Historians of Ireland have freely used the evidence of men, English or European, who came not knowing a word of the language, who traversed the country more or less rapidly under official guidance, or in the midst of armies occupied in a peculiarly ferocious warfare, or who attempted an uneasy living on the confiscated lands of the “native” people—men, in fact, who knew practically nothing but destruction. From the study of other evidence I have come to think that the view which has generally been accepted from these gentlemen is imperfect and often erroneous. They could know nothing of an earlier time and had but a partial vision of their own.

Some well-thumbed later authorities have been found to give no trustworthy guidance for medieval Ireland, and they do not appear in that customary place of authority which had become their recognised privilege; on the other hand, some entirely new authorities have been called in and some have lain unused.

Among the writers I am accused of neglecting is Captain Cuellar, a Spaniard from the Armada, knowing no Irish, flying for his life, sometimes among people who had no good reputation with the Irish themselves, hiding himself in the wildest and most secret haunts of districts swept and wasted from end to end by English soldiers—I do not know why such an experience should be quoted as a fair record of ordinary Irish life in the plains, in times of peace, and among the richer and more settled clans. Mr. Orpen, in the English Historical Review, has extracted from this little record every damaging phrase to the Irish to be found in it and omitted every favourable one. Does he wonder why I have not done the like? I have not done it because I do not think it fair dealing or honest history to state as evidence against the Irish that Cuellar was “robbed of all he possessed, stripped naked, beaten, and forced by a blacksmith to work”; and not to mention that the robbing and beating was the work of English troops and mercenaries from Scotland; that the week he spent at the blacksmith’s forge was the solitary unkindness he suffered from any native Irishman in his seven months’ wandering; that the moment an Irish chief heard of his misfortune he sent to take him to his own house; that in that seven months of journeyings in the wilds, from the day when cast on a Connacht beach, he was hidden in pity by gallow-glasses till the day when men of Ulster secured his escape across the sea, he was continually succoured by young and old, men and women, clerics and laymen, who pitied him, wept at his sufferings, showed him every hospitality and kindness, and guided him from shelter to shelter to hide him from the English. By what strange tradition, by what long prejudice is this perversion of evidence fabricated and admitted?

Besides English and Spanish testimony we have also some from the Irish themselves. Among Irish witnesses the great Galway scholar Dr. Lynch, writer of Cambrensis Eversus, stands high; no student can afford to neglect editions and translations made by Mr. Whitley Stokes and Professor Kuno Meyer in this country, and by Continental scholars; the translations of Dr. Douglas Hyde; the work of Dr. Norman Moore in the Dictionary of National Biography and elsewhere; or the collection of criticisms, translations, and summaries that make up the invaluable Catalogue of Manuscripts in the British Museum by Mr. S. H. O’Grady.

Mr. Dunlop does not like poets. “Surely she must know that the very stock-in-trade of a poet is pure moonshine,” he avers. However that may be, I may say that Mr. O’Grady’s Catalogue contains a great deal that is not poetry. “Must we remind her,” says Mr. Dunlop with the loftiest severity, “that bard and annalist were often the same individual?” The Catalogue would explain to him how impossible would be such a conception to the Irish world, where a bard was a mere natural poet who had not studied in the schools. Will Mr. Dunlop give one single instance of this frequent fact? A quotation from a blind poet peculiarly awakens his contempt, as he refers to it twice, repeating here the criticism of another writer of his school. Teigue Dall O’Higgin was a man of great eminence in his day; and I see no reason to believe that a blind man necessarily takes leave of all his senses. I have no doubt that Teigue was at home in all the gossip of Enniskillen, and that he could distinguish between the sounds of a smith’s shop, or of women talking over their embroidery, and of men bringing boats to the shore. Other references to Fermanagh which I have given in my book, and indications in the English wars of the importance of water carriage on the lake, bear out the story of Teigue the Blind. He was right about the “blue hills.”

If Mr. Dunlop accuses me of a “partiality for native records” with all their “rhetorical rhodomontade,” I frankly confess to a regard for the opinion of people who belong to a country and speak its tongue. I suppose that contemporary Irish witnesses, even the Four Masters, may be used with the same authority and the same limitations as English; nor do I know why the opinion of any stray traveller or minor official from over-sea, intent only on furthering his interests, is to be accepted without question, while the word of a deeply learned Anglo-Irish scholar of Galway, or of an eminent Irish poet who had visited every province of Ireland, is to be wholly suspect. I will give an illustration by recalling the case of Sir John Davies and of Dr. Lynch. To Mr. Dunlop the brief writings of Davies represent a very high authority, while the Cambrensis Eversus of Lynch is dismissed in one word as a “political pamphlet.” He does not apparently think Davies had any political leanings. We usually think people impartial who hold our own opinions.

In my book I have given definite reasons for thinking that Davies’ acquaintance with Irish affairs was inadequate—in a short residence in the country of which he did not know the language, the law, or the history. My own judgment is that considering his imperfect means of knowledge, and his very strong bias of prejudice, his statements about Ireland before his coming there have no particular sanctity, and need to be tested and corroborated like those of any other writer. That he is sometimes at fault even a believer such as Mr. Dunlop seems in a hidden way to admit. Suggesting that my references to the cloth trade are not so novel as unwary readers might think, “the excellent quality of Irish wool,” says Mr. Dunlop, “is one of the best attested facts in Irish commercial history.” Then why has Mr. Dunlop until this moment excluded any slightest mention of wool in his summary of Irish trade? Was it too well known? Or was it because of the saying of Sir John Davies—“for wool and wool-felts were ever of little value in this kingdom?” We are here shut into a denial of the well-attested commerce in wool, or to a doubt of the sufficiency of Sir John Davies as a witness; and we are left without guidance by Mr. Dunlop. On the whole, it seems judicious to depend on Davies’ evidence only for the things that lay within his immediate and direct observation. His opinion on all that he himself saw is worthy of respect, and we may admit the sound legal maxim that a man’s evidence can always be accepted when it is given against himself.

The same distinction may surely be drawn in the case of Dr. Lynch. Davies was a man of English and Latin learning, Lynch a man of Irish and Latin learning. The historical criticism of their day was not perfect in either country, and as Davies leant to the English side of prejudice, Lynch leant to the Irish. But Lynch, like Davies, was I believe a just reporter of what he had himself seen or had heard from firsthand witnesses. And I have therefore quoted him, as I have Davies, for what had come within the range of his personal knowledge, not for matters of historical research. His testimony is of extraordinary and pathetic interest. Born in Galway in the last years of Elizabeth, when the city still preserved its old culture and the remnants of its old wealth, Lynch was one of the last scholars who ever saw and knew the Anglo-Irish civilisation. It is not any single picture that he gives that is important; it is the host of scattered and chance allusions, as to things well known to every Irishman in his day, which reveal to us the society in which he had been brought up. It is touching to remember that he was the last to say a good word for the medieval civilisation. After his death a darkness and silence of hundreds of years fell over that story, and it is across nearly three centuries that Irishmen will now have to take hands with Lynch and carry on his justification of the Ireland which was being gradually built up by the work of Gaels, Danes, Normans, and English in their common country.

This, however, is just what Mr. Dunlop denies. He “begs leave to doubt” that the “native Irish” in the fifteenth century developed the resources of the country. By omitting all contemporary references to timber, to leather, and to salmon, of course it can be said there was no medieval trade in these. The plan seems unsatisfactory, and I have not followed it. Mr. Dunlop, for example, blames me for not quoting an English poem (no pure moonshine here—perhaps a farthing dip) which does not mention leather, as proof that there was no leather trade. I have quoted the Libel elsewhere, but on this point I preferred the direct evidence of the records of the Bruges Staple; and I have since added notices in the Hansisches Urkundenbuch for leather sent in 1304, 1327, 1453 to Bruges, Dinant, and Portugal. I would ask which is the historical method: to close the question once for all with the negative silence of an anonymous English writer “whom we think,” says Mr. Dunlop, in one of his easy moods about evidence, “had a pretty accurate notion of what constituted Irish commerce”; or to pursue enquiry in business records of the ports and seek to ascertain the exact facts.