De curti out anun iohan,
Ki pus isuffri meint [a]han.
This, however, like the other two, would be only an addition by the later versifier, and does not affect the main fact that we are dealing with a metrical version of a story contemporaneous with the conquest, and enshrining in ll. 3064–3177 “the only connected account of the subinfeudation of Leinster and Meath ... that has come down to us, a sort of original Domesday Book of the first Anglo-Norman settlement.” As such, it has the advantage of date over the ‘Expugnatio’ of Giraldus; it is also instinct with evidence of native local knowledge; and, above all, it stands apart from any other authority in its independent point of view. Giraldus wrote, as is well known, largely with the object of glorifying his relatives, who made the invasion of Ireland almost a family undertaking; in Regan, on the other hand, we have the panegyrist of Dermot and the earl of Pembroke, who carried to such a height the spirit of party faction as to denounce as “traitors” all his countrymen who were opposed to Dermot and his foreign allies.
The opening lines are, unfortunately, imperfect and so obscure that the nature of the materials from which the trouvère worked and the exact share in their authorship due to Regan have been, and must remain, to some extent matters of conjecture. Mr. Orpen himself inclines to the belief that Regan supplied the unknown trouvère with a tale already “put into metre”; but Dr. Liebermann has rightly urged the improbability of our poem being merely an adaptation of one previously composed. Indeed, that eminent scholar has advanced a theory of his own, namely, that the real original source was a “lost chronicle” about the conquest of Ireland which Giraldus Cambrensis had used in 1188 for his Expugnatio.’ And this theory he bases on some striking parallel passages.[342] To the few typical parallels adduced by Dr. Liebermann I would myself add some taken from the stirring tale of the saving of Dublin when, mad for revenge, the ousted Northmen assembled from all the isles of the north to regain their lost dominion. This sudden upleaping, for a moment, of the old wiking flame was but a splendid anachronism: like the Highland rising of the ‘forty-five,’ it was curiously out of date. Yet the old Scandinavian spirit, if dulled among the traders of Dublin, still burnt in the hardy rovers they had now summoned to their aid; and the Irish chieftain who stood aloof watching with his men the surging fray as the little band of Anglo-Normans strove to repel the onslaught, saw not merely rival conquerors, quarrelling, like vultures, for the spoil, but deadly foes whose own lives hung on the issue of that fight. But while in a fit of ‘berserker’ fury, ‘John the Mad’ led the attack against the eastern gate, Richard de Cogan, the governor’s brother, had privily sallied from another one:—
| Este vus Johan le deue Vers dyuelyn tut serre, Vers la cite od sa gent En dreite la porte del orient, . . . . . . La cite unt dunc asaillie. | Duce Johanne agnomine the Wode ... viri bellicosi ... ordinatis turmis ad portam orientalem muros invadunt. |
Then, marching round till he reached the rear of the assailants, he fell on them suddenly with a mighty shout, and the Northmen, caught between his brother and himself, wavered at last in their attack. The Danish axe still whirled in the hands of ‘John the Mad,’ cleaving its way, as of old, through helm and coat of mail:
| De une hache ben tempre Cosuit le ior un chevaler Que la quisse lui fist voler; Od tut la hache de fer blanc Lui fist voler la quisse al champe. | Militis quoque coxa ferro utrinque vestita uno securis ictu cum panno loricæ præcisa. |
But John himself fell at last; and the sons of the wikings fled to their ships. Hasculf, their king, captured alive, hurled at his captors words of scorn, and was by them promptly beheaded, “pur son orgoil e ses fous dis,” or, as Giraldus tersely puts it, “insolenti verbo.”
If Dr. Liebermann’s theory be accepted, it would involve, as he reminds us, the important consequence that we have in our poem and the ‘Expugnatio’ not two independent authorities, but narratives drawn from a common source. The discrepancies, however, between the two are so numerous and so significant that we cannot accept this new view as at all satisfactorily proved.
But turning to a third source of information, known as “the Book of Howth,” I have no hesitation in saying that its nature has been quite misunderstood. It is difficult to render clear, within a short compass, the hopeless confusion that surrounds the subject, and that is, virtually, all to be traced to an error of that ardent collector, but most untrustworthy antiquary, Sir George Carew, whose voluminous MSS. at Lambeth include both the ‘Regan’ poem and the Book of Howth, and to whom we should have felt more grateful if he would only have left them alone. But the worst offender was Professor Brewer, whose work it is the fashion to rate very highly indeed, though I have found it by no means unimpeachable even in his calendars of the state papers of Henry VIII.[343] Now the Professor ought to have been quite at home on this Irish subject, for it fell to his lot to edit the first four volumes of Giraldus as well as the Book of Howth; yet he not only stereotyped and carried further Carew’s original error, but found fault, somewhat unjustly, with Mr. Dimock’s remarks in his preface to the ‘Expugnatio.’