The Irish were further reminded of their essential unity by the great genealogical compilations in which every element of the population, Celtic and aboriginal, [pg 227] free and unfree, were traced to a common ancestry. Pride in the country which they possessed was maintained by the Dinnsenchus or collection of topographical legends dealing with hundreds of places, mountains, rivers, earthworks, roads, strands, venerable trees, in every nook and corner of Ireland—none elsewhere—all evidently things of interest to the whole people. The dignity of their race and history was recalled to them in the semi-legendary history of pagan Ireland—which is really a great epic in prose and verse, in two main sections, the Book of Invasions and the Irish Book of Kings. The subject of this work is simply Ireland. It has no other connecting motive than to satisfy the desire of the Irish to possess a complete and brilliant picture of Ireland from all antiquity. The charge was a solemn one, and carried out by generations of scholars with exact fidelity. There is no parallel elsewhere to the writing down of the great pagan epics five hundred years after Christianity, with no more direct influence of Christianity on them than we might find in the Odyssey or the Iliad.
Nor was their language the least of the spiritual possessions of the Gaelic people—that language which, following their people over Scotland, Lowlands and Highlands and the Isles, remained for some fourteen centuries the symbol of immemorial unity of their race. The pride of the race in their language was beyond that of any other people in Europe outside of the Greeks and Romans. Grammars of Irish were written in the eighth or ninth centuries, perhaps earlier, full of elaborate declensions and minute rules, accounts of obsolete words and forms and esoteric literary jargons, treatises on the Ogham alphabet, dictionaries of celebrated men and women of Ireland from remote antiquity, numerous festilogies of the national saints [pg 228] in prose and verse, with their pedigrees and legends. What mediæval language in Europe had a school of grammarians, and at what date? It may seem strange to Englishmen that this affection should have stirred the hearts of pastoral and agricultural people; but no Irish man was far removed from the immaterial and spiritual life of his country. The famous works in verse and prose, the stories, the hymns, and the songs of heroes old and new, were known by heart, and handed down faithfully for centuries in thousands of cabins; and the Irish tiller of the ground in remote places has even in our own day a rich vocabulary of six or seven thousand words. The pleasure and pride of art, so widely diffused among the mass of the people by the Irish scheme of life and education, became a natural part of the Irishman's thoughts. Their main concern in the Danish devastations was the threatened destruction of an ancient order of civilization. Before the “flood of outlanders,” says the “Colloquy of the Sages,” written probably before 850, “every art will be buffoonery, and every falsehood will be chosen.” Poems would be dark, music would be given over to boors, and embroidery to fools and base women so that no more beauty of colour could be expected; everyone will turn his art into false teaching and false intelligence, to seek to surpass his teacher. Instruction and skill would end, they lamented, with lawful princes and sages, belief and offerings, the respect of ranks and families, due honour of the young to the old, the ordered hospitality of the wealthy, and the high justice on the hilltop: “On every hill-top treachery will adventure.”
The great expression of Gaelic life was the assembly of the people, those “parles upon hills” that seemed so grievous to Elizabethan rulers. In every Federal State, such as Leinster or Munster, and in every petty [pg 229] State, they were the ever-recurring guarantee of the national civilization. The feeling of the people is shown by the constant references to “frequent assemblies,” “an assembly according to rules,” “a lawful synod.” The serious organization of these gatherings in stately form had been brought to a fine art. The business and science of the country was there open to the whole democracy. Many were the directions for the right conduct of those who took part in the assemblies—against stiffness of delivery, a muttering speech, hair-splitting, uncertain proofs, despising books, inciting the multitude, very violent urging, playing a dangerous game to disconcert the meeting, above all against ignorant or false pleading. The authority of the assembly in its exposition of the law was never questioned by the people.
“Irishmen,” wrote an English judge to Henry VIII., “doth observe and keep such laws and statutes which they make upon hills in their country firm and stable, without breaking them for any favour or reward.”
“As touching their government in their corporations where they bear rule,” wrote an Englishman, Payne, from Connacht in 1589, “is done with such wisdom, equity, and justice, as demerits worthy commendations. For I myself divers times have seen in several places within their jurisdictions well near twenty causes decided at one sitting, with such indifference that, for the most part, both plaintiff and defendant hath departed contented; yet many that make show of peace and desireth to live by blood do utterly mislike this or any good thing that the poor Irishman doth.”
A poem of about 1100 a.d. describes how the people of Leinster, by their tribes and families, celebrated their fair of Carman—Carman reputed to have come “from delightful Athens westward.” Every third year they held the feast and two years for the preparation. The kings sat in order in their Forud (a word cognate with Forum), surrounded by their councillors and [pg 230] retinue. “Each one sits in his lawful place, so that all attend to them to listen.” The women were seated in the same manner, “a noble, most delightful host, women whose fame is not small abroad.” There was a week for considering the laws and rights of the provinces for the next three years. “There aloud with boldness they proclaimed the rights of every law and the restraints.” “Annals there are verified, every division into which Erin was divided; the history of the household of Tara—not insignificant, the knowledge of every territory in Erin, the history of the women of illustrious families, of courts, prohibitions, conquests.” The accurate synchronisms of noble races, “the succession of the sovereign kings, their battles and their stern valour,” “Fenian tales of Finn, an untiring entertainment,” proverbs, maxims, royal precepts, occult poetry, topographical etymologies, the precepts of law-givers and sages—all came in their turn; and inscribed tablets, and books of trees, satires, and sharp-edged runes.
While the memory of their origin, laws, and the title of every man to his land, was thus imprinted on the people's minds, every other element of their civilization was displayed. Every day of the seven there was a show of the national sport of horse-racing. Commerce had its three markets—a market of food; a market of live stock, cows and horses; and the great market of “the foreign Greeks,” where gold and noble clothes were wont to be, carried from the branching harbours that brought hosts into the noble fair. There were trumpets and music of all sorts, and poets, exerting their utmost power till each art had its rightful meed in proper measure from the king. Professors of every sort, both the noble arts and the base arts, were there selling and exhibiting their competitions and their [pg 231] professional works to kings, and rewards were given for every art that was just or lawful to be sold or exhibited or listened to. The people might enjoy the rivalry of rustic buffoonery, pipes, fiddles, chainmen, bonemen, and tube players, a crowd of babbling painted masks—all in their due place. Everything was provided for—the slope of the steeds, the slope of the cooking, the slope of the embroidering women. And finally the day of solemnity, masses, adorations, and psalm singing, and the fast of all of them together; and so the assembly came to an end “without breach of law, without crime, without deed of violence, without dishonour.”
The king who presided over these assemblies was not a ruler in the Teutonic military sense. Ireland was free from two sources of military rule—the danger of conquest, and the fear of any attempt to force on the people a new and alien law. Protected by distance and the ocean, the island was long secured from foreign conquest: nor did the Irish need a central military power to enforce a native code which was already strong in the allegiance of the people. In this situation of comparative security the natural aim of the Irish was to preserve their local freedom. They objected, as the English after them have done, to military establishments and to compulsory service as systems which were a danger to liberty—and “liberty,” as the English officials complained, “was the only thing that Scots and Irish constantly contended for.” Herdsmen and ploughmen who carried on the business of the country refused to serve as soldiers for more than a few weeks in the year, and that only after sowing and reaping was done, and the cattle driven to pasture. Ireland was not in fact a military country. The dangers to peace lay mainly in the Gaelic law of succession to kingship and [pg 232] chieftainship, according to which the best man of the ruling kindred was elected by the freemen. Such a system provided frequent occasions of fighting—in rivalries of candidates and revolts of ambitious aspirants to power, all too ready to look for outside support, no matter where, from a neighbouring chief, a Norman baron, or an English deputy. From such variety of petty conflicts the feudal law of primogeniture saved other countries to some extent, though, as we know, that too was very far from insuring peace or harmony at all times.
Ireland no doubt suffered under this very conservative system of election, come down from the honoured past. The evils, however, were not incurable in a country left to itself. An attempt was already made to lessen them by the custom of electing along with the chief a Tanist or successor; and we can trace in Ireland also the growing custom of inheritance from father to son. The way of natural development was closed, not by the incompetence of the Irish, but by foreign enemies, who were careful to aggravate the mischief. It was the Danish wars and their results, and far more the wars of the English lord deputies, which made the very life of the tribe depend on military leadership and on that alone. The danger of local strife among independent states was in like manner exaggerated beyond measure when the deputies adopted the ferocious policy of advancing the English conquest by isolating the territories, and forcing them, on one plea or another, into civil war with their neighbours. Every territory had to maintain a retinue of soldiers out of all proportion to the normal state. Natural conditions were overturned, and statesmen then as now crippled the communities they governed with preparations for war in the interests of peace.
In the same way the growth in authority of the high-king was frustrated by external violence. During the Danish invasions the position of the high-king was of great importance as leader and centre of the national resistance, and head of the general assemblies of the country “to bring concord among the men of Ireland.” After these wars, when Ireland came more directly under European influences, efforts were made there, as in other countries, to shape a “kingdom” in the modern sense of a centralised monarchy. Such efforts after unity, which in Ireland, as in every other European country, were in any case slow and difficult, found a determined enemy in England from the time of Ruaidhri O'Conor and Henry II. onwards. In English interests, under the English “Lord of Ireland,” the island was to have no home-born king “coming to Tara,” as the mediæval phrase went, and not even a strong governor of any kind.