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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

No. 6

_Editors_:

HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.
PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, LITT.D., LL.D., F.B.A.
PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.
PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.




THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE


_VOLUMES NOW READY_

  HISTORY OF WAR AND PEACE                                 G.H. PERRIS

  POLAR EXPLORATION                    DR. W.S. BRUCE, LL.D., F.R.S.E.

  THE FRENCH REVOLUTION                           HILAIRE BELLOC, M.P.

  THE STOCK EXCHANGE: A SHORT STUDY OF INVESTMENT AND SPECULATION
                                                            F.W. HIRST

  IRISH NATIONALITY                               ALICE STOPFORD GREEN

  THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT                        J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, M.P.

  PARLIAMENT: ITS HISTORY, CONSTITUTION, AND PRACTICE
                                 SIR COURTNAY ILBERT, K.C.B., K.C.S.I.

  MODERN GEOGRAPHY                  MARION I. NEWBIGIN, D.S.C. (Lond.)

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE                                   JOHN MASEFIELD

  THE EVOLUTION OF PLANTS              D.H. SCOTT, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S.


_VOLUMES READY IN JULY_

  THE OPENING-UP OF AFRICA
                    SIR H.H. JOHNSTON, G.C.M.G., K.C.B., D.SC., F.Z.S.

  MEDIAEVAL EUROPE                                   H.W.C. DAVIS, M.A.

  MOHAMMEDANISM                        D.S. MARGOLIOUTH, M.A., D.LITT.

  THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH                              J.A. HOBSON, M.A.

  HEALTH AND DISEASE                         W. LESLIE MACKENZIE, M.D.

  INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS            A.N. WHITEHEAD, SC.D., F.R.S.

  THE ANIMAL WORLD                          F.W. GAMBLE, D.SC., F.R.S.

  EVOLUTION                               J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., and
                                                  PATRICK GEDDES, M.A.

  LIBERALISM                                       L.T. HOBHOUSE, M.A.

  CRIME AND INSANITY              DR. C.A. MERCIER, F.R.C.P., F.R.C.S.

*** Other volumes in active preparation




IRISH
NATIONALITY

BY
ALICE STOPFORD GREEN

AUTHOR OF "TOWN LIFE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY"
"HENRY II," "THE MAKING OF IRELAND," ETC.


[Illustration]


NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

LONDON
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE




COPYRIGHT, 1911,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY


THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.




CONTENTS


  CHAP.                                                      PAGE

     I THE GAELS IN IRELAND                                     7

    II IRELAND AND EUROPE                                      29

   III THE IRISH MISSION                                       40

    IV SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND                                57

     V THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL                                 77

    VI THE NORMAN INVASION                                     96

   VII THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL                               111

  VIII THE TAKING OF THE LAND                                 125

    IX THE NATIONAL FAITH OF THE IRISH                        141

     X RULE OF THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT                         158

    XI THE RISE OF A NEW IRELAND                              182

   XII AN IRISH PARLIAMENT                                    198

  XIII IRELAND UNDER THE UNION                                219

       SOME IRISH WRITERS ON IRISH HISTORY                    255




IN MEMORY
OF
THE IRISH DEAD




IRISH NATIONALITY




CHAPTER I

THE GAELS IN IRELAND


Ireland lies the last outpost of Europe against the vast flood of the
Atlantic Ocean; unlike all other islands it is circled round with
mountains, whose precipitous cliffs rising sheer above the water stand
as bulwarks thrown up against the immeasurable sea.

It is commonly supposed that the fortunes of the island and its
civilisation must by nature hang on those of England. Neither history
nor geography allows this theory. The life of the two countries was
widely separated. Great Britain lay turned to the east; her harbours
opened to the sunrising, and her first traffic was across the narrow
waters of the Channel and the German Sea. But Ireland had another
aspect; her natural harbours swelled with the waves of the Atlantic,
her outlook was over the ocean, and long before history begins her
sailors braved the perils of the Gaulish sea. The peoples of Britain,
Celts and English, came to her from the opposite lowland coasts; the
people of Ireland crossed a wider ocean-track, from northern France to
the shores of the Bay of Biscay. The two islands had a different
history; their trade-routes were not the same; they lived apart, and
developed apart their civilisations.

We do not know when the Gaels first entered Ireland, coming according
to ancient Irish legends across the Gaulish sea. One invasion followed
another, and an old Irish tract gives the definite Gaelic monarchy as
beginning in the fourth century B.C. They drove the earlier peoples,
the Iberians, from the stupendous stone forts and earthen entrenchments
that guarded cliffs and mountain passes. The name of Erin recalls the
ancient inhabitants, who lived on under the new rulers, more in number
than their conquerors. The Gaels gave their language and their
organisation to the country, while many customs and traditions of the
older race lingered on and penetrated the new people.

Over a thousand years of undisturbed life lay before the Gaels, from
about 300 B.C. to 800 A.D. The Roman Empire which overran Great Britain
left Ireland outside it. The barbarians who swept over the provinces of
the empire and reached to the great Roman Wall never crossed the Irish
Sea.

Out of the grouping of the tribes there emerged a division of the
island into districts made up of many peoples. Each of the provinces
later known as Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connacht had its stretch
of seaboard and harbours, its lakes and rivers for fishing, its
mountain strongholds, its hill pastures, and its share of the rich
central plain, where the cattle from the mountains "used to go in
their running crowds to the smooth plains of the province, towards
their sheds and their full cattle-fields." All met in the middle of
the island, at the Hill of Usnech, where the Stone of Division still
stands. There the high-king held his court, as the chief lord in the
confederation of the many states. The rich lands of Meath were the
high-king's domain.

Heroic tales celebrate the prehistoric conflicts as of giants by which
the peoples fixed the boundaries of their power. They tell of Conor
Mac Nessa who began to reign in the year that Mark Antony and
Cleopatra died, and of his sister's son Cuchulain, the champion of the
north, who went out to battle from the vast entrenchments still seen
in Emain Macha near Armagh. Against him Queen Maeve gathered at her
majestic fort of Rathcroghan in Roscommon fifteen hundred royal
mercenaries and Gaulish soldiers--a woman comely and white-faced, with
gold yellow hair, her crimson cloak fastened at the breast with a gold
pin, and a spear flaming in her hand, as she led her troops across the
Boyne. The battles of the heroes on the Boyne and the fields of Louth,
the thronged entrenchments that thicken round the Gap of the North and
the mountain pass from Dundalk and Newry into the plains of Armagh and
Tyrone, show how the soldiers' line of march was the same from the
days of Cuchulain to those of William of Orange. The story tells how
the whole island shared in the great conflict, to the extreme point of
Munster, where a rival of Cuchulain, Curoi son of Dare, had sent his
knights and warriors through all Ireland to seek out the greatest
stones for his fortress, on a shelf of rock over two thousand feet
above the sea near Tralee. The Dublin Museum preserves relics of that
heroic time, the trappings of war-chariots and horses, arms and
ornaments.

Amid such conflicts the Connacht kings pressed eastward from Usnech to
Tara, and fixed there the centre of Irish life.

The Gaelic conquerors had entered on a wealthy land. Irish chroniclers
told of a vast antiquity, with a shadowy line of monarchs reaching
back, as they boasted, for some two thousand years before Christ: they
had legends of lakes springing forth in due order; of lowlands cleared
of wood, the appearance of rivers, the making of roads and causeways,
the first digging of wells: of the making of forts; of invasions and
battles and plagues. They told of the smelting of gold near the Liffey
about 1500 B.C. and of the Wicklow artificer who made cups and
brooches of gold and silver, and silver shields, and golden chains for
the necks of kings; and of the discovery of dyes, purple and blue and
green, and how the ranks of men were distinguished henceforth by the
colour of their raiment. They had traditions of foreign trade--of an
artificer drowned while bringing golden ore from Spain, and of torques
of gold from oversea, and of a lady's hair all ablaze with Alpine gold.
Later researches have in fact shown that Irish commerce went back some
fifteen hundred years before our era, that it was the most famous
gold-producing country of the west, that mines of copper and silver
were worked, and that a race of goldsmiths probably carried on the
manufacture of bronze and gold on what is now the bog of Cullen. Some
five hundred golden ornaments of old times have been gathered together
in the Dublin Museum in the last eighty years, a scanty remnant of what
have been lost or melted down; their weight is five hundred and seventy
ounces against a weight of twenty ounces in the British Museum from
England, Scotland, and Wales.

The earth too was fruitful. The new settlers, who used iron tools
instead of bronze, could clear forests and open plains for tillage.
Agriculture was their pride, and their legends told of stretches of
corn so great that deer could shelter in them from the hounds, and
nobles and queens drove chariots along their far-reaching lines, while
multitudes of reapers were at work cutting the heads of the grain with
the little sickles which we may still see in the Dublin Museum.

But to the Irish the main interest of the Gaels lies in their
conception of how to create an enduring state or nation.

The tribal system has been much derided as the mark of a savage
people, or at least of a race unable to advance beyond political
infancy into a real national existence. This was not true of the
Gaels. Their essential idea of a state, and the mode of its government
and preservation, was different from that of mediaeval Europe, but it
was not uncivilised.

The Roman Empire stamped on the minds of its subject peoples, and on
the Teutonic barbarians who became its heirs, the notion of a state
as an organisation held together, defended, governed and policed, by a
central ruler; while the sovereign was supreme in the domain of force
and maintenance of order, whatever lay outside that domain--art,
learning, history and the like--were secondary matters which might be
left to the people. The essential life of the nation came to be
expressed in the will and power of its master.

The Gaelic idea was a wholly different one. The law with them was the
law of the people. They never lost their trust in it. Hence they never
exalted a central authority, for their law needed no such sanction.
While the code was one for the whole race, the administration on the
other hand was divided into the widest possible range of
self-governing communities, which were bound together in a willing
federation. The forces of union were not material but spiritual, and
the life of the people consisted not in its military cohesion but in
its joint spiritual inheritance--in the union of those who shared the
same tradition, the same glorious memory of heroes, the same
unquestioned law, and the same pride of literature. Such an instinct
of national life was neither rude nor contemptible, nor need we
despise it because it was opposed to the theory of the middle ages in
Europe. At the least the Irish tribal scheme of government contained
as much promise of human virtue and happiness as the feudal scheme
which became later the political creed of England, but which was never
accepted in Ireland. Irish history can only be understood by realising
this intense national life with its sure basis on the broad
self-government of the people.

Each tribe was supreme within its own borders; it elected its own
chief, and could depose him if he acted against law. The land belonged
to the whole community, which kept exact pedigrees of the families who
had a right to share in the ground for tillage or in the mountain
pasturage; and the chief had no power over the soil save as the
elected trustee of the people. The privileges of the various chiefs,
judges, captains, historians, poets, and so on, were handed down from
generation to generation. In all these matters no external power could
interfere. The tribe owed to the greater tribe above it nothing but
certain fixed dues, such as aid in road-making, in war, in ransom of
prisoners and the like.

The same right of self-government extended through the whole hierarchy
of states up to the Ardri or high-king at the head. The "hearth of
Tara" was the centre of all the Gaelic states, and the demesne of the
Ardri. "This then is my fostermother," said the ancient sage, "the
island in which ye are, even Ireland, and the familiar knee of this
island is the hill on which ye are, namely, Tara." There the Ardri was
crowned at the pillar-post. At Tara, "the fort of poets and learned
men," the people of all Ireland gathered at the beginning of each
high-king's reign, and were entertained for seven days and
nights--kings and ollaves together round the high-king, warriors and
reavers, together, the youths and maidens and the proud foolish folk
in the chambers round the doors, while outside was for young men and
maidens because their mirth used to entertain them. Huge earthen banks
still mark the site of the great Hall, seven hundred and sixty feet
long and ninety feet wide, with seven doors to east and as many more
to west; where kings and chiefs sat each under his own shield, in
crimson cloaks with gold brooches, with girdles and shoes of gold, and
spears with golden sockets and rivets of red bronze. The Ardri,
supreme lord and arbitrator among them, was surrounded by his
councillors--the law-men or brehons, the bards and chroniclers, and
the druids, teachers and men of science. He was the representative of
the whole national life. But his power rested on the tradition of the
people and on the consent of the tribes. He could impose no new law;
he could demand no service outside the law.

The political bond of union, which seemed so loose, drew all its
strength from a body of national tradition, and a universal code of
law, which represented as it were the common mind of the people, the
spontaneous creation of the race. Separate and independent as the
tribes were, all accepted the one code which had been fashioned in the
course of ages by the genius of the people. The same law was recited
in every tribal assembly. The same traditions and genealogies bound
the tribes together as having a single heritage of heroic descent and
fame. The preservation of their common history was the concern of the
whole people. One of the tales pictures their gathering at Tara, when
before the men of Ireland the ancients related their history, and
Ireland's chief scholars heard and corrected them by the best
tradition. "Victory and blessings attend you, noble sirs," the men of
Erin said; "for such instruction it was meet that we should gather
ourselves together." And at the reciting of the historic glories of
their past, the whole congregation arose up together "for in their
eyes it was an augmenting of the spirit and an enlargement of the
mind."

To preserve this national tradition a learned class was carefully
trained. There were schools of lawyers to expound the law; schools of
historians to preserve the genealogies, the boundaries of lands, and
the rights of classes and families; and schools of poets to recite the
traditions of the race. The learned men were paid at first by the
gifts of the people, but the chief among them were later endowed with
a settled share of the tribe land in perpetuity. So long as the
family held the land, they were bound to train up in each generation
that one of the household who was most fit to carry on learning, and
thus for centuries long lines of distinguished men added fame to their
country