DUBLIN A THOUSAND YEARS AGO.*
THE admirable accuracy and true historical instinct which mark Mr. Prendergast's volume on the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland extort a welcome even now, when to most English- men Irish affairs are a weary puzzle. The Scandinavian King- dom of Dublin is, it is true, the product of Mr. Charles Halli- day's research and industry, but it owes much of its interest and authority to the learned notes supplied by Mr. Prender- gast; while his memoir of the author enables us to appreciate the ample and little-known materials which Mr. Halliday had collected for his purpose, and the judgment with which he has used them. Here and there, no doubt, Mr. Prendergast's affection for his brother-antiquarian has accumulated details of Mr. Halliday's experience as a Dublin merchant, in the eccentric days when Ireland yet reeled under the political in- toxication that preceded the Union, which are hardly germane to the matter in hand. But it would be well if there were more Irishmen like the prudent and wealthy trader who knew how to use his earnings in acquisition of solid foundations whereon an authentic history of Ireland may be built. His collection of materials may be estimated by the fact that of pamphlets relating to Ireland he had 29,000, besides broadsides, ballads, and rare MSS. such as Macaulay would have rejoiced to possess. As a member of the Dublin Ballast Board, Mr. Halliday's interest was specially attracted to the history of the port of Dublin, and he ransacked all available sources, Continental and domestic, for it. Six quarto common-place books, " clearly written in a systematic manner, with references," form a vast repertory of knowledge which he had collected relating to Dublin. The recent revival of Gaelic scholarship enabled him to collate the Norse tradi- tions and Irish texts concerning Ath Cliath, the " Town of the Hurdleford," as the Gael called the Ostman settlement of Dublin. Though Dr. Todd's elaborate translation of the Wars of the Gaedhil with the Gaell was not then published, doubtless his friend Mr. Halliday profited by the learning that is shown in every page of that ancient record of Danish and Norwegian conquest.
It has been until lately difficult to disengage any trustworthy facts of early Irish history from the superstructures of visionary antiquarians, and the misrepresentations of English adventurers from Gerald Barry onwards, but scholarship and good-will have within the last thirty years deciphered some useful fragments of Gaelic literature, which, after all the vicissitudes of Irish history, remains the most voluminous of the dark ages. It proves rich in facts relating to the life of our ancestors, Gael or Norse, and its chronology, when tested by modern knowledge, appears remarkably trustworthy. Perhaps the best way of using some of these facts is in illustration of the history of a city such as Dublin, which is of actual importance and not a mere mound of grass-grown ruins. We can imagine that the • The Scandinavian Kingdom of Diablo. 137 C. Halliday. Edited by John P. Prendergast. Dublin Alex. Thom and Co. 1881.
obscurity of the subject of the Ostman capital had special attrac- tion for Mr. Halliday's antiquarian mind, while we fancy that Mr. Prendergast, the learned editor of these essays, has felt the stirrings of his Anglo-Norman blood, which sympathises rather with his Norse kinsmen and their sagas, than with the Gaelic civilisation they did so much to ruin. The history of the people who occupied the principal seaports of Ireland for three hundred years, who built castles and walled cities among the pastoral Gael of Erin, who assembled in authoritative -Thing, and who persisted in the faith of Odin longest of European societies,. certainly deserves study, though, as has ever been the case in Irish story, the native influences overbore the foreign, and the mind of the Scandinavian colonists remained as external to the Irish people as have the later English ways of life and thought. The conquerors rapidly adopted the manners of the conquered in the ninth, as in the nineteenth century, a reversal of the ordinary course of events, suggesting some singular adaptability to human nature in Gaelic law and custom, which should be studied by those who would reform them after a Teutonic model. As we enlarge our knowledge of the Irish past, we find how widely spread was Gaelic influence, and Mr. Halliday reminds us how much the wonderful Icelandic literature owes to the letters and intellectual training of Irish scholars. Their religion required the knowledge and familiar use of books, their law obliged them to be accurate in genealogy, and it is more than probable that there would have been none of the sagas relating to Scandinavian heroism, none of the careful records of the great Icelandic families, if Queen Auda, the widow of Olaf the White, had not migrated with her Irish kindred from Dublin to Iceland at the end of the ninth century. From them the noblest blood of Iceland traces its descent, while her legend declares that she died firm in her Christian faith, though she was buried, after the Viking manner, by the sea-shore, her ship turned keel upwards over her, and the place commemorated by an upright stone, which is yet visible. Not for three cen- turies afterwards were the Icelandic chronicles set down in letters, but the artistic spirit, and the characteristic manner of the historical sagas, point to their Gaelic source. From Olaf the White and Auda descended Ari, the father of Scandinavian history.
That the raids, now of the white or Norwegian, now of the black or Danish strangers in Ireland, were nearly coextensive with the island seems likely, from the complaints of the Gaelic bards that there was not a point of the coast of Erin free from the black ships of the " shouting, furious, cruel, cunning, hard- hearted strangers, in polished, pliable, triple-plated corslets, of double-refined iron and of cool, uncorroding brass. " The divisions of Ulster, Leinster, Munster, and Kunnakster (now: Connaught) are Norse, and there were "royal fleets " even to the heart of the country, wherever the ships could ascend the rivers. Mr. Halliday goes far to identify the Tur- gesius of Irish history, who established his power throughout the northern half of the island, with Ragnar Lod brog ; but be that so or not, he makes us understand the strength and extent of the Scandinavian power, when Northumbria seems to have been governed from Dublin as a, sub-kingdom. The "making of Ireland" must have been largely affected by three centuries of Danish and Norwegian invasion. The very silence of the Saxon chroniclers on the part Ireland played as a base of operations before the battle of Brunanburg, and, indeed, on all Irish affairs, lets in a side-light on the ecclesiastical jealousies which separated, even more than did differences of race, the Christians of Erin from the subjects of Canterbury. Their quarrel has never been altogether appeased, and if the Ostman customs did not obtain in Ireland any more than did the feudal and English ideas of a later date, it is partly owing to the fact that the Ostmen of Ireland and Northumbria received their faith from Anglo-Roman sources, and not from the successors of Patrick and Columba. The Dublin Bishops received consecration from Canterbury, and were thus affiliated to the brotherhood of Catholic Europe, outside which the Irish remained until the revolt of Henry VIII. cemented au alliance between them and Rome, which until then had depended on the English garrison, rather than on the obedience of the' Irish people. To the Gael of Erin the Ostmen remained pagans, or at best aliens, even after the heroic king of Dublin, Olaf Cuaran, or Olaf of the Sandal, was baptised at Leicester with great pomp, and adopted by Eadmnnd as his own son, when it was agreed that Olaf should be lord of England north of Watling Street. In his military conquest of Ireland, Olaf was
probably as successful as was his kinsman the great Gnat in England; but the " fierce, hard-hearted Danars " never imposed their laws and manners on the Gael. Those laws were, it is true, offered to the Irish with a cruelty and insolence that laid the foundation for that reserve, that untamable yet covert resistance, and hereditary antipathy to all that comes across the eastern seas which exile Ireland to this day from that Europe which is constructed on Teutonic custom and Roman law.
Mr. Halliday and his editor have obvious preference for the Scandinavian founders of Waterford, Wexford, Dublin, and Limerick. Nor can we, who have lived so many centuries by the wisdom of our Parliament, fail to sympathise in the pleasure with which Mr. Halliday proves the existence of an important " Thingmount," or place of assembly, which was raised on the shore of the Liffey, and near its mouth, by the Danish colonists of Dublin. It still existed in 1682, outside what were then the city bounds, but in what is now the midst of the newer quarter. Forty feet high and having a circumference of two hundred and forty feet, and isolated as it was on the sloping plain by the river, it must have had a wide outlook towards the bay. The absence of Roman or Saxon remains makes it easier for the antiquarian to identify Danish relics, and there seems no reason to question the identity of this mound with the place of the Getman Parliament, and the scene of their more solemn ceremonies. The hill was removed towards the end of the seventeenth century, and its materials have helped to raise Nassau Street to its present level, but we can re- construct the Dublin Thing in our imagination, and almost wish it were in existence once more, to free us from the obstruc- tion of Irish affairs. No remains have been traceable of the Temple of Thor which was generally near, but we can, by Mr. Halliday's help, picture the sacred circle within which stood the 4` godi," or magistrate, with his lagmen or doomsters, his free- men and heroes around him, in judicial and legislative council. Within sight, as was usual in Ostman colonies, were the black ships drawn up on the sandy beach, sea homes perhaps dearer to the Vikings than their cities. Mr. Halliday still further strengthens the identification of the Thingmount by discovering in local names the traces of a Hanger Hoeg, or Gallows Hill, hard by, answering to the usual place for executing the sen- tences of the Thing.
He also traces in ancient records, in maps, and leases, the existence of a pillar-stone, set up, in all probability, by the first Viking of importance who sailed up the Liffey. In the map of the Down Survey, in 1654, there is a sketch of this stone, which was probably twelve or fourteen feet above the level of the ground at that time. It remained a landmark for those FinnGall and DhuGall, those white and black strangers who, in yearly tempests, beat upon the shores of Ireland, under the Olafs, and Ivars, and Sitrics, who led their shiploads of heroes round the coasts of the islands that are now Great Britain. To them, Dublin was a convenient and central sta- tion, and there are many proofs of the large trade they carried on of treasures from Italy and the East, and even of Moorish slaves from North Africa, known to the Gael as "blue men." The religion of Odin consecrated physical valour and hardihood as the first virtue, and the training of these sons of Thor, who re- ceived his hammer-sign much as the Crusaders received the token of the Cross, must have reared a race of men enduring and brave beyond modern conception. The ships in which the vikings sailed through the northern. seas were mostly undecked ; they carried from sixty to eighty men, and yet they had but little draught of water, for we hear of their being floated by men wet only to their armpits. They were at times loaded with abundant spoils ; we read of splendid armour, gold-hilted swords, richly-orna- mented saddles and horse furniture, satins and silks, besides gold and silver in ingots. Yet the owners of these spoils endured hardships readily, of which we get a hint in the casual mention of how the Danish sailors learnt from the Irish the use of mynth.ca, or kneaded meal and butter, as a relief when water failed in their long voyages. We know that they dis- covered and even established a colony in America, named by them " White Man's Land," and reckoned as six days' sail from Ireland ; and they probably reached as far south as Florida, with means by which even Columbus would have hesitated to attempt his quest. Making every allowance for the bombast of the Gaelic chronicler of the battle of Clontarf, who was, it is thought by the learned editor of the Ware of the Gaedhil and the Gail, an eye-witness of it, the great defeat of the Danes in A.D. 1014 must have been a conflict of men physically trained
as no soldiers are now. It was the Irish Brananbarg, and only nine Danes escaped to their walled city of Dublin, near at hand, Far more picturesque than any record of Brunanburn is the Gaelic story of Clontarf. The heroism of the old King Brian, praying all the day in his tent, as he watched the ebb and flow of the battle, makes a noble background for the feats of the Irish Hector, his son Murchadh, who, with Brian's nephew and grandson, were slain before his eyes, after feats of heroism worthy of the mightiest Berserk. Earl Brodar, an apostate Dane, once a " mass deacon," cut him down as he knelt, and with Brian ended the last true monarchy of Ireland. The century that followed of dissension among the clans, religious and political, brought Ireland within the power of the Norman adventurers of 1172.
Mr. Halliday suggests grounds for believing that Henry II. only assumed rule over the Ostmen possessions in Ireland when he held his Christmas feast beside their Thingmount. The Irish Kings who attended it did so as in Danish times, not as vassals, but as guests. He claimed the coast from Arklow to Skerries, and inland to Leixlip, or the Salmon Leap, a not unusual line of Scandinavian boundary, beyond which their boats could not ascend the rivers.
Except to demand rights of English citizenship, little more is heard of the Ostmen after the arrival of their Norman kinsmen. Mr. Prendergast quotes cases curiously illustrative of the conflict of Brehon law with English law. The Irish chiefs claimed all Ost- men within their territory as subjects, because if any of them were slain his lord could claim the eric, or fine at which his subject was assessed ; while if a man enjoying " English liberty" were killed, the crime was punishable by death, and the consequent forfeiture went to the English King. A light is let in by these Ostman petitions on the personal relations of chief and clansman and on the customs of Ireland, which suggests how entirely different were the foundations of Gaelic society from that of the Teutonic races. These diversities have never been removed, and to this day they help to make the Irish inheritors of Gaelic custom and law the enigma they are to the rest of Europe, where, though, as in France, the substructure is Gaelic, the social edifice reared on it has been feudal and Roman.
Mr. Halliday has barely touched on the later history of Dublin, though his editor has enriched his book by maps of the port and suburbs at more recent times. The value of the work is in its witness to the great extent of the Danish power from the ninth to the eleventh cen- tury, which is hardly sufficiently recognised by Saxon chroniclers ; and also in its glimpses of Gaelic society, so remarkable even in its decadence during the same period. Mr. Halliday throws light on the religious antagonism which dates from the retirement of Colman before Wilfred, and the assertion of direct Roman authority, in place of St. Columba's, at the Synod of Whitby, in 664. It was embittered in Ireland by the Ostmen's Christianity, even more than by their Paganism. The Irish struggle with the Sea-king hosts forces us to recognise the strength and also the weakness of the Gaelic polity, elastic before the Scandinavian raids, but which gave way before the English power, concentrated under a monarch, and saved from Irish confusion by simpler laws of succession. .But the Gaelic tenacity and elasticity have never been subdued, and their roots in ancient Gaelic law and custom might be well worth English study. While unable to resist the military force, whether of Ragnar Lodbrog, Strongbow, or Mr. Forster, the races who have succeeded each other on Irish soil, and been subjugated by Irish influences, seem as persistently alien to all that comes from the east now, as in Ostman days.
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