Irish Nationality. Green Alice Stopford
of the earth: what was its people that they should fight against the whole world. The Europe of imperial tradition had lost comprehension of the passion of national loyalty: all that lay outside that tradition was "barbarous," the Irish like the Saxons or the Huns.
The battle that was thus opened was the beginning of a new epoch in Irish history. St. Augustine, first archbishop of Canterbury (597), was ordered (603) to demand obedience to himself from the Celtic churches and the setting aside of their customs. The Welsh and the Irish refused to submit. Augustine had come to them from among the English, who were still pagan, and still fighting for the extermination of the Celts, and on his lips were threats of slaughter by their armies to the disobedient. The demand was renewed sixty years later, in a synod at Whitby in 664. By that time Christianity had been carried over England by the Irish mission; on the other hand, the English were filled with imperial dreams of conquest and supremacy. English kings settled on the Roman province began to imitate the glories of Rome, to have the Roman banner of purple and gold carried before them, to hear the name of "Emperor of the whole of Britain," and to project the final subjugation to that "empire" of the Celt and Pictish peoples. The Roman organisation fell in with their habits of government and their ambitions. In the synod the tone of imperial contempt made itself heard against those marked out for conquest – Celts "rude and barbarous" – "Picts and Britons, accomplices in obstinacy in those two remote islands of the world." "Your father Columba," "of rustic simplicity" said the English leader, had "that Columba of yours," like Peter, the keeping of the keys of heaven? With these first bitter words, with the condemnation of the Irish customs, and the sailing away of the Irish monks from Lindisfarne, discord began to enter in. Slowly and with sorrow the Irish in the course of sixty years abandoned their traditional customs and adopted the Roman Easter. But the work of Columcille was undone, and the spiritual bond by which the peoples had been united was for ever loosened. English armies marched ravaging over the north, one of them into Ireland (684), "wasting that harmless nation which had always been most friendly to the English, not sparing even churches or monasteries." The gracious peace which had bound the races for a hundred and twenty years was broken, and constant wars again divided Picts, Scots, Britons, and Angles.
Ireland, however, for four hundred years to come still poured out missionaries to Europe. They passed through England to northern France and the Netherlands; across the Gaulish sea and by the Loire to middle France; by the Rhine and the way of Luxeuil they entered Switzerland; and westward they reached out to the Elbe and the Danube, sending missionaries to Old Saxony, Thuringia, Bavaria, Salzburg and Carinthia; southwards they crossed the Alps into Italy, to Lucca, Fiesole, Rome, the hills of Naples, and Tarentum. Their monasteries formed rest-houses for travellers through France and Germany. Europe itself was too narrow for their ardour, and they journeyed to Jerusalem, settled in Carthage, and sailed to the discovery of Iceland. No church of any land has so noble a record in the astonishing work of its teachers, as they wandered over the ruined provinces of the empire among the pagan tribes of the invaders. In the Highlands they taught the Picts to compose hymns in their own tongue; in a monastery founded by them in Yorkshire was trained the first English poet in the new England; at St. Gall they drew up a Latin-German dictionary for the Germans of the Upper Rhine and Switzerland, and even devised new German words to express the new ideas of Christian civilisation; near Florence one of their saints taught the natives how to turn the course of a river. Probably in the seventh and eighth centuries no one in western Europe spoke Greek who was not Irish or taught by an Irishman. No land ever sent out such impassioned teachers of learning, and Charles the Great and his successors set them at the head of the chief schools throughout Europe.
We can only measure the originality of the Irish mission by comparing with it the work of other races. Roman civilisation had not inured its people to hardship, nor given them any interest in barbarians. When Augustine in 595 was sent on the English mission he turned back with loathing, and finally took a year for his journey. In 664 no one could be found in Rome to send to Canterbury, till in 668 Theodore was fetched from Syria; he also took a year on his way. But the Irish missionaries feared nothing, neither hunger nor weariness nor the outlaws of the woods. Their succession never ceased. The death of one apostle was but the coming of another. The English missions again could not compare with the Irish. Every English missionary from the seventh to the ninth century had been trained under Irish teachers or had been for years in Ireland, enveloped by the ardour of their fiery enthusiasm; when this powerful influence was set aside English mission work died down for a thousand years or so. The Irish missionaries continued without a break for over six hundred years. Instead of the Irish zeal for the welfare of all peoples whatsoever, the English felt a special call to preach among those "from whom the English race had its origin," and their chief mission was to their own stock in Frisia. Finally, among Teutonic peoples politics went hand in hand with Christianity. The Teutons were out to conquer, and in the lust of dominion a conqueror might make religion the sign of obedience, and enforce it by fire and water, viper and sword. But the Irish had no theory of dominion to push. A score of generations of missionaries were bred up in the tribal communities of Ireland, where men believed in voluntary union of men in a high tradition. Their method was one of persuasion for spiritual ends alone. The conception of human life that lay behind the tribal government and the tribal church of Ireland gave to the Irish mission in Europe a singular and lofty character. In the broad humanity that was the great distinction of their people persecution had no part. No war of religion stained their faith, and no barbarities to man.
CHAPTER IV
SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND
For a thousand years no foreign host had settled in Erin. But the times of peace were ended. About 800 A.D. the Irish suffered their first invasion.
The Teutonic peoples, triumphant conquerors of the land, had carried their victories over the Roman Empire to the edge of the seas that guarded Ireland. But fresh hordes of warriors were gathering in the north, conquerors of the ocean. The Scandinavians had sailed out on "the gulf's enormous abyss, where before their eyes the vanishing bounds of the earth were hidden in gloom." An old English riddle likened the shattering iceberg swinging down from Arctic waters to the terror of the pirate's war-ship – the leader on the prow as it plunged through the sea, calling to the land, shouting as he goes, with laughter terrible to the earth, swinging his sharp-edged sword, grim in hate, eager for slaughter, bitter in the battle-work. They came, "great scourers of the seas – a nation desperate in attempting the conquest of other realms."
The Scandinavian campaigns of the ocean affected Ireland as no continental wars for the creation or the destruction of the Roman Empire had done. During two hundred years their national life, their learning, their civilisation, were threatened by strangers. The social order they had built up was confronted with two new tests – violence from without, and an alien population within the island. We may ask how Irish civilisation met the trial.
The Danes fell on all the shores of England from the Forth to the Channel, the land of the Picts northward, Iona and the country of the Scots to the west, and Bretland of the Britons from the Clyde to the Land's End: in Ireland they sailed up every creek, and shouldering their boats marched from river to river and lake to lake into every tribeland, covering the country with their forts, plundering the rich men's raths of their cups and vessels and ornaments of gold, sacking the schools and monasteries and churches, and entering every great king's grave for buried treasure. Their heavy iron swords, their armour, their discipline of war, gave them an overwhelming advantage against the Irish with, as they said, bodies and necks and gentle heads defended only by fine linen. Monks and scholars gathered up their manuscripts and holy ornaments, and fled away for refuge to Europe.
These wars brought a very different fate to the English and the Irish. In England, when the Danes had planted a colony on every inlet of the sea (c. 800), they took horse and rode conquering over the inland plains. They slew every English king and wiped out every English royal house save that of Wessex; and in their place set up their own kings in Northumbria and East Anglia, and made of all middle England a vast "Danelaw" a land ruled by Danish law, and by confederations of Danish towns. At the last Wessex itself was conquered, and a Danish king ruled over all England (1013). In Ireland, on the other hand, the invincible power of the tribal system for defence barred the way of invaders. Every foot of land was defended; every tribe fought for its own soil. There could be no subjection of the Irish