Ireland under the Tudors, with a Succinct Account of the Earlier History. Vol. 1 (of 3). Bagwell, Richard
Molloy and other chiefs who had taken the losing side were forced to give hostages to the victor. Mahon burned Limerick and drove away Ivar, who returned after a year with a great fleet, and fixed his head-quarters on Scattery Island, where St. Senanus had so sternly resisted the blandishments of a female saint.
For some years Mahon reigned undisputed King of Munster, but his successes only stimulated the jealousies of Molloy and the other Eugenian chiefs, who saw their race reduced to play an inferior part. They accordingly conspired with Ivar, and Molloy procured the treacherous murder of Mahon. The crime was useless, for Brian was left, and he immediately succeeded both to the leadership of his own tribe and to the kingdom of Munster, Molloy having certainly forfeited all moral claim to the alternate succession. Brian pursued the Danes to their strongholds, slew Ivar and his sons, and carried off the women and the treasure. There was, however, still a Scandinavian settlement at Limerick, and we find a grandson of Ivar afterwards in Brian’s service as one of the ten Danish stewards whom he employed. He was ambitious, and he had experience of the skill of such officers in extorting contributions from unwilling subjects. Molloy and his chief allies were slain; and Brian, having reduced the Limerick Danes to insignificance, turned his arm against those of Waterford, whose territory he ravaged, and whose Celtic allies, inhabiting the modern county of Waterford, he easily subdued. Brian was acknowledged as supreme in Munster, and took security from the principal churches not to give sanctuary to thieves or rebels. As the consequence of further expeditions Leinster also became tributary; and thus, in eight years after his brother’s death, Brian was admitted to be supreme in the southern half of Ireland.
In his further expeditions, undertaken with a view of becoming King of all Ireland, the Danes of Waterford sometimes accompanied Brian; but his progress towards the desired goal was arrested for a while by a prudent treaty with Malachi II., head King of Ireland, whom he acknowledged as undisputed sovereign of the northern half, and by a revolt of the Leinster men, who were allied with the Danes of Dublin, the united forces of Brian and Malachi having overthrown the Leinster Danes at Glenmama, near Dunlavin, Dublin fell an easy prey. The spoils taken are represented as enormous, and the mention of carbuncles and other precious stones, of buffalo-horns, goblets, and many-coloured vestures, betoken some degree of luxury and much commercial activity among the Danes. It is to be observed that Brian and his followers, though Christians, had no scruple about making slaves. His panegyrists simply say that the Danes by their cruelty and oppression had deserved no better treatment. Threshing and other rough work was done by the male prisoners. Menial work, including the severe labour of the hand-mill, was done by the women. ‘There was not,’ we are told, ‘a winnowing sheet from Howth to the furthest point of Kerry that had not a foreigner in bondage on it, nor was there a quern without a foreign woman.’ The fairer and more accomplished of the Danish women of course underwent the fate of Chryseis.
Having in vain sought a refuge with the northern Irish, Sitric was forced to submit to Brian, who reinstated him at Dublin as a tributary king. Sitric’s mother, Gormflaith, or Kormlada, was sister to Maelmordha, King of Leinster, and her husband, King Olaf, having been dead many years, she was free to marry Brian, which she did soon after, while Brian’s daughter married Sitric. Wielding thus the whole force of southern Ireland, Brian called upon Malachi to acknowledge his supremacy. The King of Ireland sought aid in vain from his kinsmen, the northern Hy Neill, whose king Aedh, or Hugh, sarcastically remarked that when his clan had held the chief kingship they had known how to defend their own. No help coming from Connaught either, Malachi was forced to submit to Brian’s power, and though no formal cession took place the King of Ireland quietly subsided into King of Meath.
Brian was henceforth reckoned as monarch of Ireland. He invaded Connaught with a flotilla on the Shannon and an army marching on land, and the chiefs of the western province were glad to give hostages. The Ulster potentates falling out among themselves, the north also was easily subdued, and Brian became the actual lord paramount of Ireland. After this he made a tour round the island, starting from the Shannon and marching through Roscommon and over the Curlew mountains into Sligo. Hugging the coast by Ballyshannon to Donegal, he crossed Barnesmore Gap into Tyrone, and then passing the Foyle, near Lifford, he went through Londonderry, Antrim, Down, and Louth, to the neighbourhood of Kells. In a previous expedition he had visited Armagh and laid twenty ounces of gold on the altar. A fleet, manned by the Danes of Dublin, Limerick, and Waterford, seems to have circumnavigated Ireland while he was making the circuit by land.
The supremacy of Brian was no doubt an extremely loose one. He had made no real impression on the northern tribes, and they only waited a favourable opportunity to cast off the nominal yet galling yoke. But for about seven years there seems to have been no serious attempt against him, and he was able to turn his attention to the building of churches and bridges. It was during this period that a lone woman is said to have walked unmolested from the Bloody Foreland to Glandore with a gold ring at the end of a wand. Peace, however, there was not; for Brian was engaged in at least two warlike expeditions to Ulster, and there was a fair amount of murder and private war among the minor chiefs. Brian had repudiated Gormflaith, Maelmordha’s sister and Sitric’s mother, and probably not without good reason, for her moral character was by no means on a par with her beauty and talents, since she had been married successively to Olaf Cuaran and to Malachi II., and had been repudiated by both. ‘She was,’ says the Saga, ‘the fairest of all women, and best gifted in everything that was not in her power, but it was the talk of men that she did all things ill over which she had any power.’ Brian afterwards married a daughter of the King of Connaught, and when she died, Gormflaith may have sought to be reinstated. At all events she was at Kincora when her brother arrived, bringing with him the tribute of Leinster. Her taunts, and a quarrel which he had with Murrough, Brian’s eldest son, provoked Maelmordha to leave Kincora in anger, and to raise the standard of revolt. ‘Gormflaith,’ says the Saga, ‘was so grim against King Brian after their parting, that she would gladly have him dead, and egged on her son Sitric very much to kill him.’ Sitric readily agreed to Maelmordha’s proposal, and so did the northern Hy Neill, who had never been really conquered, and who at once invaded Meath. After a gallant struggle against Leinster and Ulster, Malachi was overpowered, and called upon Brian for help. The King of Ireland, to whom the men of Connaught remained faithful, accordingly ravaged the country between his own district and Dublin, but was obliged to retire from before its walls for want of provisions.20
Sitric and Gormflaith made use of the breathing space allowed them to organise a powerful confederacy against Brian. Sitric himself went to Sigurd, Earl of Orkney, who, after many refusals, at last agreed to join, on condition of receiving the Crown of Ireland and Gormflaith’s land. ‘All his men,’ says the Saga, ‘besought Earl Sigurd not to go into the war, but it was all to no good.’ Gormflaith was well pleased at the prospect before her, and advised large preparations for the inevitable struggle.
Sigurd was nominally a Christian, but he reposed his chief trust in the raven banner which his mother had woven with mighty spells; and many Scandinavian warriors were still fanatically attached to Thor and Woden. The Vikings, Ospak and Brodir, were lying off Man, and to them Sitric next addressed himself in person. The Norsemen do not seem to have insisted on youth in their wives, for Brodir was induced to join by the same promises which had been made to Sigurd, and Gormflaith’s first husband had been dead thirty-three years. ‘Brodir,’ says the Icelandic account, ‘had been a Christian man and a mass deacon, but he had thrown off his faith and become God’s dastard, and now worshipped heathen fiends, and was of all men most skilled in sorcery. He had the coat of mail on which no steel would bite. He was both tall and strong, and had such long locks that he tucked them under his belt. His hair was black.’21
Ospak, who had leanings towards Christianity, refused to attack Brian; indeed, he went over to him, and, according to Norse accounts, was baptized. An immense force was, however, gradually
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