Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

It is in the history of the settlements formed on the Irish coast by the northern pirates in the ninth century that we must seek for the origin of those relations between England and Ireland which led to an English invasion of the latter country in the reign of Henry II. The earliest intercourse between the two islands had been of a wholly peaceful character; but it had come utterly to an end when Bishop Colman of Lindisfarne sailed back to his old home at Iona after the synod of Whitby in 664. From the hour when her missionary work was done, Ireland sank more and more into the isolation which was a natural consequence of her geographical position, and from which she was only roused at the opening of the ninth century by the coming of the wikings. In the early days of the northmen’s attack upon the British isles it was the tradition of Ireland’s material prosperity and wealth, and the fame of the treasures stored in her religious houses, that chiefly tempted the “white strangers” from the Norwegian fiords across the unknown perils of the western sea; and the settlement of Thorgils in Ulster and those of his fellow-wikings along the eastern and southern coasts of Ireland formed a chief basis for the operations of the northmen upon Britain itself. The desperate fighting of the Irish succeeded in freeing Ulster after Thorgils’s death; but by the middle of the ninth century the wikings were firmly established at four points on the Irish coast, Dublin, Waterford, Cork and Limerick.[369] Under the leadership of Olaf the Fair, Dublin became the head of a confederacy which served as a starting-point and furnished a constant supply of forces for the Danish conquests in England;[370] and for a hundred years afterwards, throughout the struggle of the house of Ælfred for the recovery of the Danelaw, the support given by the Ostmen or wikings of Ireland to their brethren across the channel was at once the main strength of the Northumbrian Danes and the standing difficulty of the English kings.[371]

To Ireland itself the results of the wiking invasions were far more disastrous than either to Britain or to Gaul. Owing to the peculiar physical character of their country, to their geographical remoteness from the rest of Europe, and to the political and social isolation which was a consequence of these, the Irish people had never advanced beyond the primitive tribal mode of life which had once been common to the whole Aryan race, but which every European branch of that race, except the Irish, had long since outgrown. In the time of Ecgberht and of Charles the Great Ireland was still, as at the very dawn of history, peopled by a number of separate tribes or septs whose sole bond of internal cohesion was formed by community of blood;—whose social and political institutions had remained purely patriarchal in character, unaffected by local and external influences such as had helped to mould the life of England or of Gaul:—who had never yet coalesced into any definite territorial organization, far less risen into national unity under a national sovereign. The provincial kings of Ulster, Connaught, Leinster and Munster were merely the foremost chieftains among the various groups of tribes over whom they exercised an ever-shifting sway; while the supremacy of the Ard-Righ or chief monarch, to whom in theory was assigned the overlordship of the whole island, was practically little more than a sort of honorary pre-eminence attached to certain chosen descendants of an early hero-king, Niall “of the Nine Hostages”; it carried with it little effective authority, and no territorial power; for the monarch’s traditional seat at Tara had long been a heap of ruins, and a tribal under-king had ousted him from the plain of Meath which in legal theory formed his royal domain.[372] Neither in the monarch himself nor in the provincial chieftains of a state thus constituted could there be found, when the storm-cloud from the north burst upon Ireland, a centre of unity even such as the peoples of Gaul found in their Karolingian sovereigns, far less such as the West-Franks found in the dukes of the French, or such as the English found in their kings of the house of Ecgberht. The stress of the northmen’s attack, which elsewhere gave a fresh impulse to the upgrowth of national life, crushed out all hope of its developement in Ireland. The learning and the civilization of ages perished when Columba’s Bangor, Bridget’s Kildare, Ciaran’s Clonmacnoise, Patrick’s own Armagh, shared the fate of Bæda’s Jarrow and Hild’s Streoneshealh, of Cuthbert’s Melrose and Aidan’s Lindisfarne; and in Ireland there was no Wessex and no Ælfred.

On the other hand, the concentration of the wiking forces upon Britain had given to the Irish an advantage which enabled them to check the spread of wiking settlements in their country; and the failure of all attempts to establish a Scandinavian dominion in Britain destroyed all chance of a Scandinavian conquest of Ireland. The Ostmen never even gained such a footing in Ireland as the followers of Hrolf gained in Frankland: their presence never received the sanction of any Ard-Righ; they were not a compact body occupying the whole of an extensive and well-defined territory, but a number of separate groups settled here and there along the coast, and holding their ground only by sheer hard fighting against a ring of implacable foes. The long struggle may be said to have ended in a defeat of both parties. The Irish kings of Munster succeeded in establishing a more or less effective overlordship over the Scandinavian communities of Limerick and Waterford; and in 989 Malachi II., supreme monarch of Ireland, reaped his reward for nine years of desperate fighting in the submission of the Ostmen of Dublin. The city was blockaded and starved into surrender, and a yearly tribute was promised to Malachi and his successors.[373] Six years later “the ring of Tomar and the sword of Carl”—two heathen relics probably of ancient heroes, which seem to have been treasured as sacred emblems of sovereignty by the Ostmen[374]—were carried off by Malachi as trophies of another victory;[375] and in 999 or 1000 a renewal of the strife ended in a rout of the Ostmen and a great slaughter of their leaders, and Dublin was sacked and burnt by the victorious Irish.[376]

Malachi’s triumph, however, was gained at the cost of a disruption of the monarchy. Malachi himself was displaced by a king of the rival house of Munster, his colleague in the sack of Dublin, the famous Brian Boroimhe;[377] Brian’s career of conquest ended in 1014 on the field of Clontarf, where he was slain in battle with the men of Leinster and the Ostmen;[378] and when Malachi, who now resumed his place, died in 1022,[379] the downfall of the Irish monarchy was complete.[380] The tradition which had so long linked it to the house of Niall had been shattered by Brian’s successes; and Brian had not lived to consolidate in his own house the forces which had begun to gather around himself. Thenceforth the Scandinavian colonies simply furnished an additional element to the strife of the Irish chieftains, and to the rivalry between the O’Briens of Munster and the O’Neills of Ulster for the possession of a shadowy supremacy, claimed by the one house as descendants of Brian Boroimhe and by the other as heirs of Malachi II. and of his great ancestor Niall.