“The Teach Miodhchuarta,” says the old prose writer in the Dinnseanchus, “is to the north-west of the eastern mound. The ruins of this house—it was even then in ruins—are situate thus: the lower part to the north, and the higher part to the south; and walls are raised about it to the east and to the west. The northern side of it is enclosed and small; the lie of it is north and south. It is in the form of a long house, with twelve doors upon it, or fourteen, seven to the west and seven to the east. This was the great house of a thousand soldiers.”[31] We ourselves have lunched on the grass-green floor of this once famous hall; and we can of our own knowledge testify to the accuracy of this ancient writer. The openings for the doors can still be traced in the enclosing mound; and curiously enough, one is so nearly obliterated that it is difficult still to say whether there were six or seven openings on each side. The building was seven hundred and sixty feet long, and originally nearly ninety feet wide, according to Petrie’s measurements. There was a double row of benches on each side, running the entire length of the hall. In the centre there was a number of fires in a line between the benches, and over the fires was fixed a row of spits depending from the roof, at which a very large number of joints might be roasted. There is in the Book of Leinster a ground-plan of the building, and the rude figure of a cook in the centre turning the spit with his mouth open, and a ladle in his hand to baste the joint. The king of Erin took his place at the head of the hall on the south surrounded by the provincial kings. The nobles and officers were arranged on either side according to their dignity down to the lowest, or northern end of the hall, which was crowded with butlers, scullions, and retainers. They slept at night on the couches, but not unfrequently under them.
The appearance of Cormac at the head of this great hall is thus described in an extract copied into the Book of Ballymote from the older and now lost Book of Navan[32]:—
“Beautiful was the appearance of Cormac in that assembly. Flowing and slightly curling was his golden hair. A red buckler with stars and animals of gold, and fastenings of silver upon him. A crimson cloak in wide descending folds around him, fastened at his neck with precious stones. A neck torque of gold around his neck. A white shirt with a full collar, and intertwined with red gold thread, upon him. A girdle of gold inlaid with precious stones was around him. Two wonderful shoes of gold, with golden loops, upon his feet. Two spears with golden sockets in his hands, with many rivets of red bronze. And he was himself besides symmetrical and beautiful of form, without blemish or reproach.”
This might be deemed a purely imaginary description, if the collection of antiquities in the Royal Irish Academy did not prove beyond doubt that golden ornaments similar to those referred to in this passage were of frequent use in Ireland. In the year 1810 two neck torques of purest gold, the same as those described above, were found on the Hill of Tara itself, and are now to be seen in the Academy’s collection.
“Alas,” says an old writer, “Tara to-day is desolate; it is a green grassy land; but it was once a noble hill to view, the mansion of warlike heroes, in the days of Cormac O’Cuinn—when Cormac was in his glory.”
Everything at Tara, even its present desolation, is full of interest, and reminds us of the days “when Cormac was in his glory.” His house is there within the circle of the great Rath na Riogh. The mound where he kept his hostages may still be seen beside his Rath. The stream issuing from the well Neamhnach, on which he built the first mill in Ireland for his handmaiden, Ciarnaid, to spare her the labour of grinding with the quern, still flows down the eastern slope of Tara Hill, and still, says Petrie, turns a mill. Even the well on the western slope, beside which Cormac’s cuchtair, or kitchen, was built, has been discovered. The north-western claenfert, or declivity, where he corrected the false judgment of King Mac Con about the trespass of the widow’s sheep may still be traced. The Rath of his step-mother, Maeve, can be seen not far from Tara; and to the west of the Teach Miodhchuarta may be noticed Rath Graine, the sunny palace of his daughter, the faithless spouse of Finn Mac Cumhail.
O’Flaherty tells us on the authority of an old poem found in the Book of Shane Mor O’Dugan, who flourished about A.D. 1390, that Cormac founded three schools at Tara—one for teaching the art of war, the second for the study of history, and the third was a school of jurisprudence. It was, doubtless, the first regular college founded in ancient Erin, and like the school of Charlemagne, was within the royal palace. The fact is extremely probable, especially as Cormac himself was an accomplished scholar in all these sciences. This brings us to the literary works attributed to Cormac Mac Art by all our ancient Irish scholars.
The first of these is a treatise still extant in manuscript entitled Teagusc na Riogh, or Institutio Principum. It is ascribed to King Cormac in the Book of Leinster written before the Anglo-Norman Invasion of Ireland. It takes the form of a dialogue between Cormac and his son and successor, Cairbre Lifeachair; “and,” says the quaint old Mac Geoghegan, “this book contains as goodly precepts and moral documents as Cato or Aristotle did ever write.” The language is of the most archaic type; some extracts have been translated and published in the Dublin Penny Journal.
A still more celebrated work, now unfortunately lost, the Saltair of Tara, has been universally attributed to Cormac by Irish scholars. Perhaps we should rather say it was compiled under his direction. “It contained,” says an ancient writer in the Book of Ballymote, “the synchronisms and genealogies, as well as the succession of the [Irish] kings and monarchs, their battles, their contests, and their antiquities from the world’s beginning down to the time it was written. And this is the Saltair of Tara, which is the origin and fountain of the histories of Erin from that period down to the present time.” “This,” adds the writer in the Book of Ballymote, “is taken from the Book of Ua Chongbhail”—that is the Book of Navan—a still more ancient but now lost work. Not only do the writer in the ancient Book of Navan, and the copyist in the Book of Ballymote, expressly attribute this work to Cormac, but a still more ancient authority, the poet Cuan O’Lochain, who died in A.D. 1024, has this stanza in his poem on Tara:—
“He [Cormac] compiled the Saltair of Tara,
In that Saltair is contained
The best summary of history;
It is the Saltair which assigns
Seven chief kings to Erin of harbours,” &c., &c.