Ireland under the Tudors, with a Succinct Account of the Earlier History. Vol. 1 (of 3). Bagwell, Richard
and of the plunder which the first invaders had accumulated from all the Irish churches. Before one of the battles fought to decide whether Black or White Pagans were to enjoy this property, Horm, or Gorm, the Danish chief, is said to have invoked St. Patrick, a singular confusion of ideas, which may have resulted from intercourse with Christians in England. Victory followed. The Black Gentiles seem to have retained their supremacy; but the distinction becomes partly obliterated, and the Danes, of whom we read later, were probably intermingled with Norwegians. It is recorded that Amlaf, son of the King of Norway, came to Ireland in 852 or 853, that all the foreigners of Erin submitted to him, and that the Irish also paid tribute. The name of the Black Gentiles is believed to be preserved in the little town of Baldoyle.
Amlaf and his sons were not satisfied with the spoils of thrice plundered churches, but everywhere violated tombs in search of gold ornaments. Another great chief was Ivar, who appears to have been Ivar Beinlaus, son of Ragnar Lodbrok, and founder of the Northumbrian kingdom, which was afterwards closely connected with the Irish Danes. To the Norwegians who fled to Ireland from the iron rule of Harold Harfager, the King of Dublin was one of the chief sovereigns on earth. Carrol, lord of Ossory, was in alliance with Amlaf and Ivar, and ruled Dublin after their deaths; but he died about 885, and a Norse dynasty was then re-established by force. A dozen years later another Carrol drove the foreigners across the Channel, but Sitric, king of Northumberland, regained the fortress in 919, and the Celts do not appear to have recaptured it. For a period of some forty years, ending about 916, Ireland is said to have had a little rest. The enemy may have had enough to do elsewhere, but their predatory expeditions did not entirely cease. There were perhaps no fresh invasions in force, but former settlers held their own against the Irish, with whom they were generally at war.
Whatever may have caused the period of comparative rest, the Danish incursions began again with renewed vigour. A great host came to Waterford in 916, defeated the men of Leinster, and harried all the south of Ireland; churches, as usual, attracting their special attention. Ragnal, Ivar’s grandson, represented by the Ulster annalists as king of all the Irish Scandinavians, was the chief leader, and he afterwards led his men to Scotland, where the great but indecisive battle of Tynemoor was fought.17 Sitric, Ragnal’s brother, took Dublin from the Irish, who had, perhaps, held it since 902, and on Ragnal’s death succeeded to the royal title. The natives had occasional successes, but on the whole they were conspicuously inferior in the field, and Nial Glundubh, King of Ireland, who headed a great confederacy, fell in the attempt to recover Dublin. Twelve chiefs or kings of northern and central tribes are said to have died at the same time. After this reverse all serious attempt to check the invaders seems to have been given up, and fleet after fleet brought hordes of oppressors to the ill-fated island. Munster suffered especially, and the general nature of a Danish invasion cannot be better apprehended than by transcribing the chronicler’s words: – ‘And assuredly the evil which Erin had hitherto suffered was as nothing compared to the evil inflicted by these parties. All Munster was plundered by them on all sides and devastated, and they spread themselves over Munster and built earth-works and towers and landing-places over all Erin, so that there was no place in Erin without numerous fleets of Danes and pirates; so that they made spoil-land and sword-land and conquered-land of her throughout her breadth and generally; and they ravaged her chieftainries, privileged churches, and sanctuaries, and demolished her shrines, reliquaries, and books. They wrecked her beautiful ornamental temples: for neither veneration, nor honour, nor mercy for holy ground, nor protection for church or sanctuary, for God or man, was felt by this furious, ferocious, pagan, ruthless, wrathful people. In short, until the sand of the sea, the grass of the field, or the stars of heaven are counted it will not be easy to recount or enumerate or relate what the Gaedhil, all, without distinction, suffered from; whether men or women, boys or girls, laics or clerics, freemen or serfs, young or old; indignity, outrage, injury, and oppression. In a word, they killed the kings and the chieftains, the heirs to the crown, and the royal princes of Erin. They killed the brave and the valiant, the stout knights, champions, soldiers, and young lords, and most of the heroes and warriors of all Ireland; they brought them under tribute and reduced them to bondage and slavery. Many were the blooming, lively women; the modest, mild, comely maidens; the pleasant, noble, stately, blue-eyed young women; the gentle, well-brought-up youths; and the intelligent, valiant champions, whom they carried to oppression and bondage over the broad green sea. Alas! many and frequent were the bright eyes that were suffused with tears and dimmed with grief and despair at the separation of son from father, and daughter from mother, and brother from brother, and relatives from their race and from their tribe.’18
The Irish Danes became strong enough to interfere with effect in English politics, and Olaf Cuaran, or Sitricson, King of Dublin, was a general of the great Scandinavian army which Athelstane overthrew at Brunanburgh. The Danes were much fewer than the Irish, but their general superiority during the tenth century was incontestable; and had the invaded people been of kin to them the kingdom of Canute might have had a counterpart in Ireland. Irish Celts were only too ready to call in Scandinavian allies in their internal quarrels, but they could never amalgamate with them. Occasionally a confederation of tribes would gain a great success, as at the battle of Tara, where King Malachi defeated the Dublin Danes under Athelstane’s old opponent, Olaf Cuaran. After great slaughter on both sides the Dublin men had the worst, and were forced to release Donnell, King of Leinster, who was then in their hands. A great part of Ireland was at this time subject to the Danes, and the battle of Tara has been called the end of the ‘Babylonish captivity of Ireland, inferior only to the captivity of hell.’ King Olaf went on a pilgrimage to Iona, where he died in the following year. Thirty-seven years had passed since his acceptance of Christianity, at least in name; yet the Danes plundered the sacred isle only five years later, in 986, and killed the abbot and fifteen of his monks. It is to be noted that the Scandinavian treatment of churches reacted on the Irish, and that many native warriors came to regard saints and sanctuaries with as little respect as Turgesius himself.
Munster seems to have been more completely subdued than any other part of Ireland. The Danish stations at Waterford, Cork, and Limerick made invasion at all times easy, and the sons of Ivar bid fair to found a lasting dynasty at the latter place. There was a tax-gatherer in every petty district, a receiver to intercept the dues of every church, a soldier billeted in every house, ‘so that none of the men of Erin … had power to give even the milk of his cow, nor as much as the clutch of eggs of one hen in succour or in kindness to an aged man, or to a friend, but was forced to preserve them for the foreign steward, or bailiff, or soldier. And though there were but one milk-giving cow in the house she durst not be milked for an infant of one night, nor for a sick person, but must be kept for the steward, or bailiff, or soldier of the foreigners. And however long he might be absent from his house, his share or his supply durst not be lessened; although there was in the house but one cow, it must be killed for the meal of the night, if the means of a supply could not be otherwise procured.’19
At last a deliverer arose. According to the will of Olioll Olum, King of Munster in the third century – such is the theory – the sovereignty of Cashel, that is of Munster, was to belong alternately to the races of his two sons, Eoghan Mor and Cormac Cas. The Eoghanachts and Dal Cais are generally Anglicised as the Eugenians and Dalcassians; the strength of the former and much stronger tribe being in Cork, Limerick, and Kerry – that of the latter in Clare. The Eugenian Fergraidh was king in 967, when he was murdered by his own people. Mahon the Dalcassian then became king, in compliance with the constitutional theory, but not without a struggle. Urged on by his brother Brian, he attacked the Danish settlements up and down the country, and became master of Cashel, when Ivar, finding his supremacy threatened, summoned all that would obey him to root out utterly the whole Dalcassian race.
The tribes of Western Munster generally were disposed to follow Mahon, but Molloy, King of Desmond, and some others, adhered to the Dane rather than admit the supremacy of a local rival. A pitched battle took place at Solloghead,
Reeves’s Adamnan, p. 332 n.