Early Medieval Ireland
Introduction
This exhibition marks two important anniversaries: the 1,500th anniversary of the death of St Brigid and the 1,010th anniversary of the Battle of Clontarf. It explores various themes in Edward Worth’s small but remarkably comprehensive collection of texts by some of the most important early modern commentators on early medieval Ireland.
William Camden, Britannia: or a Choriographical Description of Great Britain and Ireland, together with the Adjacent Lands Written in Latin by William Camden and translated into English with additions and improvements by Edmund Gibson, 2 vols (London, 1722), i, frontispiece portrait of William Camden.
Edward Worth (1676–1733), was clearly interested in medieval Irish history: he had not one but two copies of the 1603 Frankfurt re-issue of Anglica, Normannica, Hibernica, Cambrica, a veteribus scripta, written by the famous English historian William Camden (1551–1623). Crucially, for historians of early medieval Ireland, Camden’s text (which had initially been printed the previous year at Frankfurt), included the first full printing of the controversial Topographia Hibernica of the Welsh writer Gerald of Wales (c. 1146–c. 1223). This inflammatory text inspired various refutations in the course of the seventeenth century. Worth not only bought them but, in the case of the Dublin edition of Geoffrey Keating’s The general history of Ireland (Dublin, 1723), subscribed to them.
Sir James Ware, Two histories of Ireland. The one written by Edmund Campion, the other by Meredith Hanmer (Dublin, 1633), title page.
Worth was clearly interested in refutations by Catholic authors such as Keating (c. 1580–1644), Peter Walsh (c. 1616–88), and Roderick O’Flaherty (1629–1718), writers who sought to refute not only Topographia Hibernica, but also the late sixteenth-century outpourings of English authors such as Edmund Campion (1540–81), and Meredith Hanmer (1543–1604), whose works Worth owned in the seminal 1633 publication by Sir James Ware (1594–1666): Two histories of Ireland. The one written by Edmund Campion, the other by Meredith Hanmer (Dublin, 1633). Campion’s hastily written text owed much to the library of James Stanihurst (1522–73), who was the father of Campion’s protégé, the Dublin historian Richard Stanihurst (1547–1618), and with whom Campion had stayed in 1570-71. Richard Stanihurst not only revised Campion’s text but also produced two other texts which Worth collected: a history of Ireland called De rebus in Hibernia gestis, libri quattuor (Antwerp, 1584) and a life of St Patrick: De vita S. Patricii, Hiberniae apostoli, libri II (Antwerp, 1587).
Richard Stanihurst, De rebus in Hibernia gestis, libri quattuor (Antwerp, 1584), title page.
To this Worth added to his collection an even more important hagiographical account of the early medieval catholic church: Florilegium insulae sanctorum seu Vitae et acta sanctorum Hiberniae (Paris, 1624) of Thomas Messingham (c. 1575–1638?), who, like Stanihurst, was a member of an Old English family.[1] In this he explores the lives of saints such as Patrick, Brigid and Colum Cille (Columba) in the context of the continental Catholic reformation of the early seventeenth century. Messingham’s work also included valuable information about the renowned St Patrick’s Purgatory, a topic which was also explored in Worth’s copy of Ware’s second (and much augmented) edition of De Hibernia & antiquitatibus ejus, disquisitiones (London, 1658). Ware’s works are well represented for Worth owned his De praesulibus Hiberniae, commentarius. A prima gentis Hibernicae ad fidem Christianam conversione, ad nostra usque tempora (Dublin, 1665), and a work on much later history, his Rerum Hibernicarum annales, regnantibus Henrico VII. Henrico VIII. Edwardo VI. & Maria. Ab anno … 1485; ad … 1558 (Dublin, 1664), which focused on the reigns of the Tudor monarchs.
Roderick O’Flaherty, Ogygia: seu, Rerum Hibernicarum chronologia… (London, 1685), title page.
Most of these books were bought by Edward Worth but he inherited his copy of O’Flaherty’s Ogygia (London, 1685) from his father John Worth (1648–88), Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. Worth senior was clearly interested in history and, as the inscription at the top of the page makes clear, he bought the Ogygia the year it was published. The attraction of the Ogygia to Worth senior, an Anglican clergyman, is not hard to understand, for O’Flaherty sought to provide an overarching chronology of Irish events, using both sacred and secular sources. The text was dedicated to James (1633–1701), Duke of York and Albany, who would later become James II of England, and O’Flaherty sought to prove that the Stuart kings were the direct descendants of the old Irish monarchs and thus had the authority to ‘be the corner-stone to unite the two kingdoms’.[2]
Image of the spines of Worth’s copies of Sir James Ware’s Two histories of Ireland. The one written by Edmund Campion, the other by Meredith Hanmer (Dublin, 1633), and Thomas Messingham’s Florilegium Insulae Sanctorum, seu vitae et acta sanctorum Hiberniae (Louvain, 1624).
Unlike his father, Edward Worth did not add helpful provenance notes but he did leave us some pointers which help date when some of his books on Irish history may have reached his collection. His copy of Ware’s De Hibernia & antiquitatibus ejus, disquisitiones (London, 1658), had previously been owned by Louis-Henri Loménie, Comte de Brienne (1635–98), whose family library had come on the market in London in 1724.[3] Worth not only owned the auction catalogue of the sale but the book bears the Brienne family shelf mark on its front pastedown. Three other items may be dated to 1720s on the grounds of binding style, for his spines of his copies of Ware’s 1633 Two Histories, Messingham’s Florilegia and Lombard’s De Regno Hibernia all bear the distinctive Worth binding tools, which the bindery named after him used in the 1720s up until his death in 1733.
This exhibition explores early modern approaches to some of the most famous ‘saints and sinners’ of early medieval Ireland. It investigates the early modern historiography of early Christian saints such as Patrick and Brigid; various descriptions and interpretations of St Patrick’s Purgatory, and, last but not least, the depiction of two of the most important generals at the Battle of Clontarf: Brian Bórama (Bóruma, Boru) (d. 1014), high-king of Ireland, and his intriguing opponent Sitriuc Silkbeard (Sitric, Sigtryggr Ólafsson Silkiskeggi) (d. 1042), king of Dublin. We hope you enjoy it!
Reconstructing saints in early modern Europe:
St Patrick and St Brigid.
Thomas Messingham, Florilegium Insulae Sanctorum, seu vitae et acta sanctorum Hiberniae (Louvain, 1624), title page vignette of Saints Patrick, Brigid and Colum Cille.
These three in Down are entombed in one mound,
Brigid and Patrick and holy Columba…[4]
Though Edmund Campion and Richard Stanihurst both use the above distich in their sections on the early Irish church, they have relatively little to say about the third of the trio of saints, Colum Cille (Columba) (c. 521–597), founder of the monastery of Iona.[5] In fact, their principal focus was on St Patrick (c. 420–490?), and then, to a much lesser degree, St Brigid (possibly c. 450–524). As Bernadette Cunningham has noted, in the sixteenth century there were numerous sources available for writing an appraisal of the career of Patrick but undoubtedly the most influential texts for both Campion (and Stanihurst) were two twelfth-century texts: Giraldus Cambrensis’ Topographica Hibernica and the much more detailed Vita sancti Patricii episcopi by the Cisterian Jocelin of Furness (fl. 1185–1200).[6] Campion devoted three chapters in Book I of his history to the discussion of early Christianity in Ireland: chapter XII deals with ‘The conversion of the Irish to Christianity’; chapter XIII concentrates on ‘Saint Patrick’s Purgatory’ and chapter XIV, more generally, on ‘The Irish Saints’. In his chapter XII Campion concentrated on the role of Rome in the mission of Palladius and Patrick. Using Jocelin of Furness’ Life of St Patrick he opted for an English/Scottish origin story, but one which linked St Patrick with another famous saint, Martin of Tours (d. 397): ‘Patricius was borne in the marches of England and Scotland, in a sea towne called then Taburnia, whose father Calphrune (as writeth Ioseline) was a Deacon and a Priests sonne, his mother conches was sister to S. Martin, the famous Bishoppe of Toures in France’.[7]
Richard Stanihurst, De vita Sancti Patricii libri duo (Antwerp, 1587), title page.
Stanihurst says relatively little about St Patrick in De rebus in Hibernia gestis, libri quattuor – perhaps because he may have already decided to devote a short book to the subject. This was printed at Antwerp three years later, in 1587, and Worth owned a copy. Stanihurst’s De vita Sancti Patricii libri duo is a small but important work for it is the first clarion call by Old English catholic writers based on the continent to update the lives of the Irish states to bring them in line with the continental reforms of the Catholic Church. Stanihurst’s Vita, like that of Campion, was heavily dependent on Gerald of Wales (hereafter Giraldus), and Jocelin, but went much further than his mentor had done in projecting a view of St Patrick as the Apostle of Ireland. As Ryan notes, the dedication of the work to Alexander Farnese (1545–92), Duke of Parma and governor of the Spanish Netherlands, was intended to draw a direct connection between the war against heresy in the Netherlands and St Patrick’s evangelization in Ireland.[8]
Thomas Messingham, Florilegium Insulae Sanctorum, seu vitae et acta sanctorum Hiberniae (Louvain, 1624), title page vignette detail of St Patrick.
Much has been written concerning the treatment of Irish saints by early modern Catholic authors. This was a wide-ranging project and, as Salvador Ryan notes, was one with a myriad of aims.[9] Undoubtedly one of the most important aims (at least in Old English eyes) was to remodel Irish saints to fit them into the new norms of the Catholic reformation and one of the most important works on the subject was by another Old English writer, Thomas Messingham.[10] As O’Connor states, Messingham ‘was among the first of the Irish Counter-Reformation clergy to recognise the political and pastoral usefulness of a modernised native Irish hagiography’.[11] Messingham’s Florilegium Insulae Sanctorum was a tour de force. While the contents of the book were not new – as Bernadette Cunnigham reminds us, it contained texts already available in print: Jocelin of Furness’s life of St Patrick, the influential life of St Brigid by Cogitosus (fl. c. 650), and Adomnan’s life of Colum Cille – the presentation of the three saints had undergone what we would now term a ‘makeover’.[12] We see this in the above image of St Patrick where the saint is portrayed in the vestment of a seventeenth-century bishop. He carries his staff (a sign of his authority), and has a full beard – similar to Old Testament figures. The political implications are likewise clearly evident in Messingham’s depiction: An angel carries a banner with the inscription ‘Haec est vox Hiberni genarum’ while another script issues from the mouth of the faithful ‘Veni adiuva nos’. The message was clear: the faithful Irish were calling to their co-religionists in Europe for help!
Messingham and his Old English colleagues sought to project a version of St Patrick which would be agreeable to the Roman ecclesiastical commission charged with drawing up a new breviary. This was not just a matter of ensuring visibility for the Irish Catholic diaspora in continental Europe. The life of St Patrick was a historiographical battlefield, one which had been made all the more dangerous by the 1602 printing of the full version of Giraldus’ Topographica Hibernica by Camden. For his own political gains, Giraldus had sought to undermine the idea of the continuity of Christianity in Ireland from St Patrick onwards. Old English seventeenth-century writers such as Messingham and Keating were eager to contradict Giraldus and sought to persuade their colleagues that the Irish church had been true to the papacy from St Patrick onwards. The issue of the continuity of the Irish Catholic church would prove to be a major topic of debate between Catholic writers such as David Rothe (1573–1650), bishop of Ossory, and Protestant writers such as James Ussher (1581–1656), Church of Ireland archbishop of Armagh. It was also, as Cunningham notes, a feature of Keating’s Foras feasa ar Éirinn.[13]
Peter Lombard, De regno Hiberniae sanctorum insula commentarius (Louvain, 1632), title page.
There was, however, not just one depiction of St Patrick: other Catholic writers focused on different aspects of the saint. Some focused on Patrick as a miracle worker. Certainly this was the theme of another of Worth’s books, the De regno Hiberniae sanctorum insula commentarius (Louvain, 1632) of Peter Lombard (c. 1554–1625), archbishop of Armagh, who was based in Louvain. This was a wide-ranging work, written in Rome c. 1600 but not published until 1632. Like Campion and Stanihurst, Lombard’s principal source was Jocelin of Furness, but unlike some of his Old English colleagues, Lombard included much more information about miracles. In particular, he drew connections between St Patrick and Moses – an idea that later would be reworked by the Franciscan author Peter Walsh, in 1682 in his A prospect of the state of Ireland (London, 1682) – which was also owned by Worth.
John Colgan, Triadis thaumaturgae seu Divorum Patricii Columbae et Brigidae, trium veteris et maioris Scotiae, seu Hiberniae sanctorum insulae, communium patronorum acta, a variis … authoribus scripta, ac studio … Ioannis Colgani …; complectitur tomus secundus sacarum eiusdem insulae antiquitatum (Louvain, 1647), title page.
Franciscans in particular, took a very different approach to St Patrick than either Messingham or Stanihurst. To writers such as John Colgan (1592?–1658), the importance of saints such as Patrick, Brigid or Colum Cille, lay not only in their contemporary political uses and but also in the good example they offered the church at a time of trial. Coupled with this was the realization that unless a major project of historiography was undertaken, precious sources would be destroyed.[14] Worth didn’t own the massive Acta sanctorum veteris et maioris Scotiae, seu, Hiberniae sanctorum insulae, produced by Colgan (with the assistance of many others) in 1645, but he had the companion volume, which appeared in 1647: Triadis Thaumaturgae (Louvain, 1647), in which Colgan offered his readers the source material for St Patrick, St Brigid and St Colum Cille. As Ryan notes, Colgan provided his readers with a cornucopia of sources on the three saints: seven lives of Patrick, six of Brigid and five for Colum Cille.[15] Far from shying away from mysterious miracles, Colgan aimed to provide the historical source material to highlight what might be seen as a spiritual inspiration to the faithful. Here we find echoes of earlier works: the linkage of St Patrick and Moses, the importance of relics such as the Bachal Ísu (a theme which would be explored by Peter Walsh also). Here too, we find an appendix devoted to the controversial St Patrick’s Purgatory.[16] Like Campion and Stanihurst, Colgan pointed to the triple grave in Downpatrick but to him it was more than a coincidence – it was a sign of special divine favour for these three particular saints.[17]
Thomas Messingham, Florilegium Insulae Sanctorum, seu vitae et acta sanctorum Hiberniae (Louvain, 1624), title page vignette detail of St Brigid.
Colgan’s provision of six lives of St Brigid was crucial for the reception of the most important Irish female saint, for she had, to a certain extent, been neglected in late sixteenth-century commentaries. Campion’s account of the life of St Brigid was brief and, as he acknowledged himself, heavily dependent on that of Giraldus Cambrensis. He tells us that:
Brigide was base Daughter of Dubtachus a Captaine in Leinster, who perceiving the Mother with child, sold her secretly, fearing the jealousy of his wife, to a Irish Poet, reserving to himselfe the fruite of her wombe, she was there delivered of this Brigide, whom the Poet trained up in letters, and so conveyed her home to her father. The Damosell was schooled in the faith by S. Patricke, preaching then in those parts, she became so religious, and so ripe in judgement, that not onely the multitude, but a whole synode of Bishoppes assembled by Dublin, used her advice in weighty causes, and highly esteemed her. One fact of hers being yet a childe, made her famous. The King of Leinster had given to Dubtachus in token of singular affection, for his good service, a rich sword. Now it befell, that the maiden visiting her sicke neighbours, diversely distressed for hunger, (her father being a sterne man, his Lady a shrewe) she saw none other helpe to relieve these wretched people, but to part the Iewels of that idle sword among them. This matter was haynously taken, and came to the Kings eares, who (coming shortly after to a Banquet in her fathers house) demaunded the Girle, not yet nine yeares old, how she durst presume to deface the gift of a King, shee answered, that it was bestowed upon a better King, then hee was, whom (quoth shee) finding in such extremity, I would have given all my father hath, and that thou hast, yea your selves and all, were yee in my power to give, rather then Christ would starve.
At convenient age she professed virginity, and allured other noble Virgins to her fellowship, with whom she lived in her owne Monastery, until the yeare of our Lord 500 and was buried at Downe, in the Tombe of S. Patricke, what Cambrensis reporteth of his own knowledge and sight, I will be bold to adde hereunto. Among her reliques, was found a concordance of the 4 Evangelists, seeming to bee written with no mortall hand, beautified with mysticall pictures in the margent, whose colours and workemanship, at the first blush were darke and unpleasant, but in the view wonderfully liuely and artificiall.[18]
It is a succinct account but offered the reader more than his colleague Stanihurst, who says surprising little about Brigid in his De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis, except to note her resting place in Armagh.
The reason for this is not hard to understand for material about St Brigid offered challenges to Old English Catholic authors, eager to bring the early saints of the Irish church in line with new orthodoxies. As McCafferty has pointed out, in Messingham’s celebrated title page vignette St Brigid fares even worse than St Patrick for she is shorn of many identifiers of key elements of her cult and now blends in as a typical abbess of the seventeenth century.[19] He rightly points out that if her image was not titled, the reader might not be able to readily identify her! Coupled with this is a small but subtle indication of her standing in Messingham’s eyes: though chronologically she pre-dates Colum Cille, in the vignette she comes last.[20] Thus, while Messingham seemed to give St Brigid equal status with St Patrick and St Colum Cille, it was a status with caveats. We have already seen Campion’s approach – keep it short and leave out the ‘awkward bits’ – i.e. the joint monastery, the heightened role of women. It wasn’t as if they couldn’t find information about her. As McCafferty points out, Cogitosus’ seventh-century life had not only been printed by Bonino Mombrizio (1424?–82?) at Milan in 1486, but had also been included in Henricus Canisius’ Antiquae Lectionis (Ingoldstadt, 1601–4), Laurentius Surius’ De Probatus Sanctorum (Cologne, 1576–81), David Rothe’s Brigida Thaumaturga (Paris, 1620) and, finally, by Rothe’s associate, Messingham, in 1624 at Louvain.[21] To John Colgan, however, St Brigid was the ‘patroness of the whole commonwealth of Ireland’ and he therefore duly included the many lives he and his colleagues had tracked down.[22]
Thomas Messingham, Florilegium Insulae Sanctorum, seu vitae et acta sanctorum Hiberniae (Louvain, 1624), title page vignette detail of Colum Cille.
While sixteenth-century writers might have displayed considerably less interest in Brigid and Colum Cille, Worth needed to look no further than his copy of Peter Walsh’s A prospect of the state of Ireland (London, 1682) to find out a detailed exploration of the latter’s life. In general, Walsh adopted a somewhat magpie approach to saints lives and unfortunately has hardly anything to say about St Brigid. However, following one of his chief sources, Keating’s Foras feasa ar Éirinn, he provides his readers with considerably more detail about Colum Cille. It is clear that he was also familiar with Colgan’s work via references in John Lynch’s Cambrensis Eversus (Saint Malo, 1662).[23] Walsh explained where Colum Cille’s name of Columba (dove) originated and was keen for his readers to understand that while Colum Cille had played such an important role in the evangelization of Scotland, he was an Irish saint:
As 1. That he was born in Ulster, and the Son of Feilimidh, the Son of Fergus, the Son of Conal Gulbhann, the Son of Niall the Great, surnamed also Naoighiallach, Monarch of Ireland. Which I note against some Scottish Authors, that contrary to all known truth, would make him a Scotchman. 2. That his proper name received in Baptism was Criomhthan: and the name of Columb-Cille was given him by Children, his Play-fellows; who because of his Dove-like simplicity, and because when he came to them upon a certain day, once every week, where they with great longing expected him, he always came to them immediatly out of the Church or Monastery wherein he was educated (at Dubghlaissa in Tirconel) therefore they, so soon as he appear’d to them, cried forth unanimously with one voice, Columb ne Cille. Whereof his Instructors taking notice at last, thought it the will of God he should be so called thence-forward by all others too, even as the innocent Children had already and constantly once a week by their joyful acclamations begun to those three distinct Irish words importing in English the Dove of the Church. For in that Language Celumb is a Dove, and Ceall, or Cill is a Church, Monastery, or Cell. And hence it was that Criomhthan came to be generally called no more Criomhthan, but Columb-Cille; the middle word at first used by the Children, being left out of the composition for brevities sake.[24]
Walsh also paid more attention to Saints Malachy and Laurence, especially St Malachy’s prophecies – eager as he was to please his readers – and he made it clear that one of his chief sources of information on Malachy and his prophecies was Messingham’s Florilegium.[25] Walsh seems to have been particularly attracted to unusual stories and he provides a lengthy account on the Bachal Ísu, citing Jocelin of Furness as his principal source on the origins of the wonder-working staff.[26] Walsh explained that one celebrated use by St Patrick of the Bachal Ísu had been when he used it to cast snakes out of Ireland:
Unto which he addeth (cap. 170.) concerning also the powerful Virtue of it, That by lifting it up on high, and threatning with it, Patrick, after a long Fast of forty days and forty nights, join’d with continual fervent Prayer, forc’d together out of all parts of Ireland, all venomous Animals whatsoever, to the Mountain call’d in Irish Cruachain Ailge, in the West of Conaght, and from thence precipitated them into the Western Ocean, lying under this Mountain: and this with such a blessed riddance to the whole Island, as to have left or have rendred it ever since incapable of harbouring any creature alive that were Poisonous, though brought into it from other Countreys.[27]
Protestant writers on St Patrick and St Brigid
James Ussher, Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates (Dublin, 1639), title page.
For Protestant writers such as Meredith Hanmer, the many strange tales of the saints offered cannon fodder in disputes about the nature of the medieval Irish Church. However, the real prize in such disputations was to prove that St Patrick was, in fact, a proto-Protestant. As Meredith Hanmer argued ‘[the] only doctrine Patric read and expounded … was the four evangelists, conferred with the Old Testament’.[28] Ussher and David Rothe had been engaged in a celebrated dispute about the early church and Worth was clearly interested in works by both authors. He owned the Analecta sacra (Cologne, 1617), of Rothe and the Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates (Dublin, 1639) of Ussher. The latter work, a magnum opus by one of the most celebrated ecclesiastical historians of the age, provided readers with a host of sources, while Ussher sought, as Alan Ford so rightly states, ‘to bring order and coherence to the study of Patrick’.[29]
Sites of pilgrimage in early Christian Ireland:
St Patrick’s Purgatory and Clonmacnoise.
In their lives of the saints, many Irish early modern writers drew attention to relics (such as the Bachal Ísu) and pilgrimage sites associated with the various saints. Undoubtedly the most famous of all was St Patrick’s Purgatory, which had risen to prominence in the high middle ages. As Shane Leslie, writing in 1932 evocatively wrote, ‘St. Patrick’s Purgatory was the medieval rumour which terrified travellers, awed the greatest of criminals, attracted the boldest of knight errantry, puzzled the theologian, englamoured Ireland, haunted Europe, influenced the current views and doctrines of Purgatory, and not least inspired Dante’.[30] The twelfth century witnessed what one can only call a public relations exercise by the archbishopric of Armagh to promote the site as a place of pilgrimage. Henry of Saltrey (fl. c. 1184), Jocelin of Furness (fl. 1199–1214), Matthew Paris (c. 1200–59) and Giraldus Cambrensis all wrote about this site.[31] Giraldus referred to it in his section on marvels, stating that there existed an island in a lake in Ulster, which was divided into two parts, one ‘frequented by good spirits, the other by evil spirits’.[32] Natives called it ‘St Patrick’s Purgatory’ and it was thought that the saint had devised it to show, in very real terms, the perils of the afterlife for those who did not repent their sins. But Giraldus’ account was tame in comparison with more detailed descriptions of what happened to visitors to the cave.
When the story of St Patrick’s Purgatory was incorporated into The Golden Legend – a text written by Jacobus de Voragine (c. 1260–98), which became a ‘best-seller’ in the middle ages, its fame spread across Europe.[33] Soon pilgrims came from as far away as Hungary to witness for themselves whether the tales told about it were true. As Michael Haren and Yolande de Pontfarcy explain in their book on the subject, St Patrick’s Purgatory became a major pilgrimage site in medieval Europe.[34] It was undoubtedly contentious – Sir James Ware notes that it was ‘demolish’d as a fictitious thing, on St. Patrick’s Day, in the year 1497, by authority of Pope Alexander VI, by the Guardian of the House of the Minorits of Donegall’ – but it quickly recovered and, judging by the letter written by Francesco Chiericati (1479–1539), to Isabelle d’Este (1474–1539), Marquise of Mantua, in 1517, was still very much in vogue.[35] As Mary Purcell suggests, Chiericati’s visit was less a pilgrimage and more a sight-seeing trip, undertaken while this papal legate had some free time to spare, away from the court of Henry VIII (1491–1547).[36]
Sir James Ware, De Hibernia & antiquitatibus ejus, disquisitiones (London, 1658), p. 222, plan of St Patrick’s Purgatory.
Ware offered his readers not only an analysis of earlier written sources but also images of the material culture of the period. His De Hibernia & antiquitatibus ejus, disquisitiones (London, 1658) is a treasure trove for anyone interested in such disparate subjects as early harps, coins or monuments. Luckily many of these were additions to the 1658 second edition, which Worth owned, an edition which makes it clear that Ware was approaching history with an eye to the material remains, as well as the annalistic sources (of which he had many).[37] Among these images Ware offered his readers a number of plans and two of these specifically related to important sites associated with pilgrimage in early medieval Ireland: St Patrick’s Purgatory and Clonmacnoise.
In his De Hibernia & antiquitatibus ejus, disquisitiones (London, 1658), Ware provided his readers with a map of the island of which St Patrick’s Purgatory stood, and explained the structures as follows:
It is to be noted, that the Circles there mention’d, commonly call’d Beds, inclos’d with stone-walls scarce three foot high, were the places where the Pilgrims perform’d their Penance. As to the Cave it self, it was built of Free-stone, and cover’d with broad flags, and green turf laid over them. The door being shut, there is no light but what enters at a little Window in the corner. It is in length within the walls 16 foot and a half, and in breadth 2 and an inch. And as the Cave is small, so likewise is the Island, which (as we have before said, Chap. X) is scarce three quarters of an Irish Acre. The Church of this Island was heretofore called Regles, says the History of Jorval, Henry Knighton, and others. But whether it were so called from the Reliques that were there preserv’d, or because it was inhabited by Regular Canons, let others inquire.[38]
He briefly alluded to its complicated history, noting that it had not only been associated with St Patrick but also with a ninth-century abbot of the same name, but said little more except that ‘Of this Cave, strange and incredible things are related’.[39]
St Patrick’s Purgatory was a subject which intrigued most of Worth’s early modern commentators on early medieval Ireland. It is clear that by the late sixteenth century, when Edmund Campion was writing his history, that commentary on the controversial site was obligatory, for Campion ruefully noted that his readers might have thought him remiss if he ignored the topic altogether.[40] Campion clearly had some doubts about the story, noting a number of chronological discrepancies, and opted for the story that the site had been founded in the ninth century by an Abbot called Patrick. Despite his doubts he offers his readers a rather detailed account, based, as he acknowledged, on Polychronicon:
This I learne, that the holy Abbot Patricius secundus, not the Bishop their Apostle, laboured the conversion of the people of Ulster, which being now Christians, could yet at no hand be wonne to renounce their olde sensuality, cruelty, murders, extortion. And when he much informed the life to come, they replyed unto him with contempt, that unless they saw proofes of these Ioyes and paines hee preached, they would never leese possession of the pleasure in hand, for hope or dread of things to come they wist not when. At their importunacie hee besought God, were it his good pleasure to give out some evident token of the maters they required, finally by the special direction of God he found in the north edge of ulster a desolate angle hemmed in round, & in the mids thereof a pit, where he reared a Church, closed the same with a wall, bestowed thereing a Canons regular, at the East end of this Church yarde, a doore leadeth into a closet of stone, which they call the Purgatory, because devout people have resorted thither for penance, and reported at their returne, strange visions of paine and blisse appearing to them. They used to continue therein four e & twenty houres, which doing one while with ghostly meditations, and another while a dreadfull conscience of their deserts, they saw as they say, a plaine resembling of their owne faults and vertues, with the horror and comfort therefore belonging, that one so terrible, the other so joyous, that they verily deeme themselves for the time to have sight of heaven and hell. The revelations of men that went it (Saint Patricke yet living) are kept written within the saide Abbey. When any person is disposed to enter (for the doore is ever sparred) he repaireth first for advice to the Archbishop, who casteth all perils, and disswadeth him, because they say diverse never came backe againe, but if the party be resolute, he recommendeth him to the Pryor, who in like manner favourably exhorteth him not to hazard such a danger, if not-withstanding he finde the party fully bent, he conducteth him to this Church, enjoyneth him to begin with prayer, fast and vigil for 15 dayes, so long together as in discretion can be endured. This time expired, if he yet persevere in his former purpose, the whole Convent accompanieth him with solemne procession and benediction to the mouth of the cave, where they let him in, & so barre up the doore till the morrow, & then with like ceremonies they awaite his returne, & reduce him to the Church. If he be seene no more, they fast & pray 15 dayes after. Touching the credit of those matters, I see no cause but a Christian man assuring himselfe that there is both hel & heaven, may without vanity upon sufficient information, be persuaded that it might please God at somtime for considerations to his infinit wisdom known to reveale the by miracles the vision of Ioyes & paines eternal, but that altogether in such sort, & so ordinarily, & to such persons, and by such meanes as the common fame & some records thereof doe utter, I neither believe, nor wish to be regarded.[41]
Campion based his research not only on sources such as the Polychronicon, but also his interactions with people who had been there – who confirmed his suspicions:
And a man of indifferent judgement may soone suspect that in the drift and strength of Imagination, a contemplative person would happely suppose the sight of many strange things which he never saw. Since writing hereof I met with a Priest, who told mee that he had gone the same pilgrimage, and affirmed the order of the premises: But that he for his owne part saw so sight in the world, save onely fearefull dreames when he chanced to nod, and those he saith were exceeding horrible: further he added, that the faste is rated more or lesse, according to the quality of the penitent, and that the place seemed to him scarcely able to receive sixe persons.[42]
Stanihurst, in his De Rebus in Hibernia gestis, also demonstrated that the early modern reading public knew something of St Patrick’s Purgatory and was eager to learn more, but for his part, he decided against including any detailed description in his book, suggesting that he would revisit the topic at a later date. Clearly his reticence was due to some caution, for he ended his account by saying:
since I have never visited these places, and have never received confirmation of their veracity from men of faith and religion, I have thought it better to maintain complete silence about the doubtful wonders than to spread reports of uncertain things as it they were certain.[43]
Caution was warranted because in the hands of a theological opponent, material on St Patrick’s Purgatory could be dynamite. Meredith Hanmer, viewing the story from a strict Protestant perspective, was eager to point out the holes in the tale. His account attempted to apply a pseudo-scientific explanation of what was actually happening:
The sounder opinion is, (the which Stanihurst at unawares remembered out of Claudianus) that the place there, was in like sort as it is now in the time of Paganisme, and was long before St Patrickes dayes, And it seemeth to be after the manner of concavities in the bowels of the earth, where the ayre entring naturally to avoid Vacuum, and the winde following, whisteleth and crieth like dolefull ghosts, the silly ignorant and simple people being deceived through perwasion of covetous Priests, that some soules and spirits doe penance there for their sinnes, call it a Purgatorie. And further we see by reason and daily experience in Miners, that if any be much under grownd, the dampnesse of the earth takes away their lively colour, and makes them looke ghastly, and if they continue any long while there (the vitall spirites being barred of their usuall course) they are mightily tormented, cast into trances, and distracted, and being once delivered from the place, report things at random of heaven and earth, believe them who list.[44]
Hanmer clearly knew the story of the knight, Owain, a story which had made St Patrick’s Purgatory famous throughout Europe, for he mentions having read of it in both Matthew of Paris and Polychronicon.[45] He concluded that the tale of Knight Owain’s journey through Purgatory ‘seems to be no antient matter, but a late device, first found by this Owen, in the late days of King Stephen’.[46]
The Island of St Patrick’s Purgatory thus presented a challenge to Catholic historians of the seventeenth century. Geoffrey Keating, while clearly interested in purgatory from a theological perspective (as his sections on it in his Tri bio-ghaoithe an bháis testify), in the main avoided the topic in his General History of Ireland, though he did attack Hanmer’s interpretation in his preface.[47] Citing as his sources Caesarius Heisterbacensis (c. 1180–1240) and ‘the ancient Records and Traditions of the Kingdom’, Keating stuck with the theory that the Purgatory had originally been founded by St Patrick.[48] His decision to say relatively little may have been because he was very much aware that Thomas Messingham had already considered the matter in some depth in his Florilegium, which, as Bernadette Cunningham notes, may well have been an inspiration for Foras Feasa.[49] Keating’s interpretation heavily influenced that of Peter Walsh, whose A prospect of the state of Ireland (London, 1682), Worth also owned.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca, El Purgatorio de San Patricio (Madrid, 1685), title page.
Messingham’s account proved to be very influential. In fact, it later formed the basis of a play by a famed dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age, Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81) – a play which Worth owned in his collection of plays by Calderón. The play was entitled El Purgatorio de San Patricio and, while it certainly wasn’t responsible for introducing the Spanish public to the pilgrimage site and the story of Owain, it served to popularise it.[50]
Sir James Ware, De Hibernia & antiquitatibus ejus, disquisitiones (London, 1658), p. 304, plan of the cemetery of Clonmacnoise.
By contrast with St Patrick’s Purgatory, Clonmacnoise, another important pilgrimage site was far less contentious. Ware’s map of the cemetery of Clonmacnoise was an addition to the 1658 edition and is the first map of the cemetery to be produced in the early modern period. Like that of the island of St Patrick’s Purgatory, it offers the reader a bird’s-eye view of the enclosure and a table to explain the various structures. Here we see 6 churches within the walls: ‘Temple Keran’, ‘Temple Ri’, ‘Temple Connor’, ‘Temple Kelley’, ‘Temple McDermott’ and ‘Temple Hurpan’, the largest of which is ‘Temple McDermott’. Ranged directly outside are ‘Temple Espic’, ‘Temple Ganny’, ‘Temple Killin’ and ‘Temple Finian’.
As Conleth Manning notes, this plan offers the reader the earliest names for these churches and, though the plan itself may not be absolutely accurate in its depiction, it is of immense value for reconstructing what was still visible to eyewitnesses in 1658 for Temples G, H and I no longer survive.[51] In addition, the plan shows two crosses – the Cross of the Scripture is in front of the cathedral, and a smaller cross is identifiable to the south east. Some areas may have been embellished by the engraver, the famous Wencelas Hollar (1607–77) who, as Manning notes, added roofs which were likely not to have been in existence in the 1650s.[52] Clonmacnoise had been in decline since the twelfth century. Prior to that it had been a target for many Viking raids, especially by the mysterious Viking ‘Turgesius’ (Turges [Thorgest, Thorgils, Thurkill] (d. 845).[53]
What’s in a Name? ‘Ostmen’ and the rise of the dynasty of Uí Ímair.
Sir James Ware, Two histories of Ireland. The one written by Edmund Campion, the other by Meredith Hanmer (Dublin, 1633), pp 48–9.
Turgesius wasn’t the first Viking to arrive in Ireland, but he certainly was the most celebrated during the first Viking Age in Ireland. The first Viking raid in Ireland is dated to 795 and in the following decades Ireland witnessed a series of hit and run coastal raids, culminating in a settlement led by ‘Turgesius’ who was finally overcome by the king of Meath in 845. Shortly after the fall of Turgesius, Giraldus Cambrensis recounts the arrival of another group of Vikings, who he calls ‘Ostmen’. Among these were Viking leaders who we know today as the progenitors of the Uí Ímair, a Viking dynasty who ruled Dublin and various port cities for around 150 years.[54] Their origins, and the sequence of events in the mid ninth century at the time of their arrival have been bones of contention ever since.
William Camden, Anglica, Normannica, Hibernica, Cambrica, a veteribus scripta (Frankfurt, 1603), p. 749.
Giraldus provides us with the first explanation of their origins:
Not long afterwards, some adventurers arrived again in the island from Norway and the Northern islands, who were either the remains of the former immigrants of that race who had seen with their own eyes, or their sons who had learnt from the reports of their parents, the wealth of the land. They did not come in ships armed for war, but in guise of peace, and under the pretext of being merchant adventurers; so that having first established themselves in the seaports of Ireland, at length, with the consent of the lords of the territory, they built several cities in these places… These foreigner had for leaders three brothers, whose names were Amelaus, Sytaracus, and Yvorus. They built first three cities of Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick, of which Dublin fell into to the share and was under the government of Amelaus, Waterford of Sytaracus, and Limerick of Yvorus; and from them colonies were sent in process of time to found other cities in Ireland … They are called Ostmen in their own language, from a word corrupted in the Saxon language, which means Eastern-men, for, as regards this country, they arrived here from the East. From these settlers, and the former immigration of the Norwegians (against whom they found little security), the natives learnt the use of the axe…’[55]
For Giraldus, Olaf, Sitric and Ívaar were merchants who simply inveigled their way into Ireland. This characterization might have surprised the ‘merchants’ themselves, given their subsequent brutal campaigns both in Ireland, Scotland and England! It was certainly questioned by seventeenth-century writers such as Sir James Ware (1594–1666), who queried Giraldus’ interpretation, writing ruefully that ‘But to speak my Opinion of this Narration of his, it will appear certain, I think that those Easterlings seated themselves in those Maritime parts of the Kingdom, not under pretence of Traffick, nor by consent of the Irish, but by Force of Arms’.[56]
While Stanihurst’s De rebus in Hibernia gestis adds little to our knowledge of the origins of these mid ninth-century invaders, the same cannot be said about Campion and Hanmer who introduce two conflicting interpretations, each of which move away from a specifically Norwegian origin and casts light on late sixteenth-century interpretations of the origins of the Vikings. Campion tells us that ‘certain marchants out of Norway, called Ostomanni Easterlings, because they lay East in respect of us, though they are indeede properly Norman, & partly Saxon, obtained licence safely to land and utter their wares’.[57] While it is true that the term ‘Norman’ was simply another way of saying ‘Northman’ (a term liberally used in contemporary sources), it is clear that Campion is pushing the definition a little further.[58] Citing Philip Flatsbury’s chronicle he argued that whether Vikings were called Norwegians, Danes, Normans or Easterlings, all were in fact Norman:
‘And it is to be noted, that these are the Danes, which people (then Pagan) wasted England, and after that, France. From when they came againe into England with William the Conqueror. So that Ostomani, Normans, Easterlings, Danes and Norway-men are in effect the same, and as it appeareth by conference of times and Chronicles, much about one time or season, vexed the French men, subdued the English, and multiplied in Ireland. [An. Dom. 900].
But in the year of CHRIST 1095 perceiving great envy to lurke in the distinction of Easterlings and Irishe utterly west, and because they were simply Northerne, nor Easterne, and because they magnified themselves in the late conquest of their Countreymen, who from Normandy flourished now in the Realme of England, they would in any wise bee called and counted Normans.’[59]
They were following in the footsteps of Turgesius, who, in Campion’s words, ‘with his Normans assaulted Ireland’.[60] ‘Norman’ for Campion, was not only short-hand for men from the North – it might also be used as a politically charged word to link earlier Viking invasions with the later Norman invasion.
Saxo Grammaticus, Danorum regum heroumque historiae … (Paris, 1514), title page.
Hanmer opted for a different possible gene pool by bringing Danes into the equation. He initially did this in his description of Turgesius as ‘Captaine of the Norwegians, Danes or Esterlings’ and it is clear that while Campion may have favoured a ‘Norman’ origin story, Hanmer opts for Denmark as the principal source of Viking incursions.[61] By the time of Turgesius’ death, his followers had become, in Hanmer’s eyes ‘Norwegians and Danes’.[62] Certainly by the beginning of the tenth century Denmark is the source of Viking incursions in Hanmer’s account, an account which liberally uses the Gesta Danorum by the twelfth century Danish historian and theologian Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1150 – c. 1220) as a trusted source.
Fair and Dark Foreigners
But what was actually happening in mid ninth-century Ireland? And who were the Olaf, Sitric and Ívaar mentioned by Giraldus? Clearly Giraldus perceived some connection between the Vikings of the first decades of the ninth century and the subsequent dynasty of the Uí Ímair for he says of the ‘Ostmen’ that they were ‘adventurers… from Norway and the Northern islands, who were either the remains of the former immigrants of that race who had seen with their own eyes, or their sons who had learnt from the reports of their parents, the wealth of the land’.[63] The Annals of Ulster offer us more information and, tantalizingly, a glimpse of a clash between two rival groups of foreigners, the Finngaill (the Fair Foreigners) and the Dubgaill (the Dark Foreigners). The first hint of trouble was in June 849 when ‘A naval expedition of seven score ships of adherents of the king of the foreigners came to exact obedience from the foreigners who were in Ireland before them, and afterwards they caused confusion in the whole country’. Then in March 851 ‘The dark heathens came to Áth Cliath, made a great slaughter of the fair-haired foreigners, and plundered the naval encampment, both people and property. The dark heathens made a raid at Linn Duachaill, and a great number of them were slaughtered’. In March 852 the fair-haired foreigners fought back: ‘The complement of eight score ships of fair-haired foreigners came to Snám Aignech, to do battle with the dark foreigners; they fought for three days and three nights, but the dark foreigners got the upper hand and the others abandoned their ships to them. Stain took flight, and escaped, and Iercne fell beheaded.’ Finally, in February 853 ‘Amlaíb, son of the king of Lochlann, came to Ireland, and the foreigners of Ireland submitted to him, and he took tribute from the Irish’.[64]
Geoffrey Keating, The general history of Ireland (Dublin, 1723), title page.
Seventeenth-century sources such as Keating and Ware who had access to these annals were all eager to comment both on the annalists’ use of the term ‘Fair-haired’ (Finngaill) and ‘Dark-foreigners’ (Dubgaill). Keating offers the following definition of the terms ‘Dubhgeinte’, ‘Finngeinte’ and ‘Lochlannaig’ in Worth’s copy of the Dublin 1723 edition, a definition which is referred to in Walsh’s Prospect also:
Neither are we to reject the Testimony of those Writers, who affirm that the Danes landed in the Country when Olchobhair, was in Possession of the Throne of Munster; for those Foreigners, who made an Attempt upon the Island at that Time, were Natives of the Kingdome of Dania of Denmark, and these People are call’d in the old Irish Records by the Name of Dubhgeinte or Dubh Lochlannaig; the Norwegians, who came originally from Norway, are stiled in the Chronicles Finngeinte or Finn Lochlannaig. It is to be observ’d in this Place that the Word Lochlannach, does not signifie in the Irish Language any particular Tribe or Nation, but it implies Strong or Powerful at Sea, for the Word Lonn signifies Strong in the English, and Loch is the Irish Word for the Sea; for the People of Norway and Denmark were skilful in Navigation and expert Seamen, and by their Shipping transported powerful Armies into Ireland, when they attempted to make a Conquest of the Country’.[65]
The accompanying marginal note in Worth’s edition, states that ‘The Natives of Denmark call’d the black Danes’ and this reflects Keating’s Irish text which talks about ‘loingeas mór Dubhlochlonnach ón Dania .i. Denmarke, go h-Áth Cliath’.[66] This large fleet attacked the coasts and routed the Fair Foreigners. This certainly reflects the account in the Annals of Ulster which talk about strife between Fair Foreigners who are attacked and overcome by Dark Foreigners. And certainly in the English translations of Keating, while the terms ‘Danes’ and Norwegians’ are sometimes used interchangeably, the focus is on ‘Danish’ Vikings.
However, this may not have been Keating’s intention for in this case much has been added in translation.[67] We see this in two different ways. First, in the marginal notes which differ between the London and Dublin editions. As we have seen, Worth was a subscriber to the Dublin copy, which included marginal notes in English while the London edition preserves the marginal notes in Irish. In the latter we can see the broader term ‘Lochlannaig’ being used throughout whereas the marginal notes of the Dublin edition invariably ignore Keating’s above definition of the overarching term ‘Lochlannaig’, and instead consistently translate the word as ‘Danish’.
A closer look at Keating’s Irish text demonstrates that he rarely uses the term ‘Finn’ or ‘Dubh’ gaill, instead preferring to use the broader term ‘Lochlonnaigh/Lochlonnaibh’ throughout. We see the translator of the 1723 English edition ignoring this on a number of occasions, assuming that ‘Lochlonnaigh’ is the equivalent of ‘Danish’. One interesting instance of this concerns one of the three Viking leaders, Olaf. In the 1723 London edition we read the following:
Not long after this Victory of the Danes, Amhlaoibh (otherwise call’d Amelanus by some Authors) Son to the King of Denmark, arrived in Ireland, with a Design to take upon himself the Command of the Danes that were dispers’d throughout the Island; and putting himself at the Head of his Countrymen, he fought the Natives in several Engagements with great Advantage…[68]
Keating’s original text does not make this connection between Olaf and Denmark, instead following the Annals of Ulster, by calling him ‘Amhlaoibh mac ríogh Lochlonn’, ‘Olaf, son of the king of Lochlann’.[69] Equally, when the English translator talks about ‘Humphry Son to the King of Denmark’ killing ‘Connor the son of Donnogh’, Keating’s original text describes him as ‘Amlaoibh mac ríogh Lochlonn’, ‘Olaf, son of the king of Lochlann’.[70]
Sir James Ware, De Hibernia & antiquitatibus ejus, disquisitiones (London, 1658), p. 349. Image of what Ware calls a ‘Danish sepulchre’.
Sir James Ware also refers to the annalistic distinction between Finngaill and Dubgaill in his chapter on ‘divers Names by which the Antient Irish called Foreigners, especially their Neigbours’:
The Antient Irish generally called all Foreigners, especially their European Neighbours, of whatever Nation, promiscuously Gauls. From hence the little Territory near Dublin Northward herefore possess’d by the Norwegians, was called Fingall: ….Yet it is to be confess’d, that the English were commonly called by the Irish Saxons, the Danes likewise and Norwegians, who subdued a great part of Ireland, in the IX Age, and possess’d Dublin, Waterford, Limerick, and other Maritime Towns, till the coming of the English under Hen. II, were sometimes called Normans, as denoting Men from the North, sometimes Ostmen, to denote Men of the East. From them the North Suburbs of Dublin took the Name of Ostman Town, called corruptly Oxman-Town, which it retains to this day. Some divide these Normans, or Ostmen, into Dubgalls, and Fingalls: By the Dubgalls, or Black Foreigners, meaning the Danes; And by the Fingalls, or White Foreigners, the Norwegians.’[71]
However, in his chapter specifically on ‘Easterlings, or Danes and Norwegians’ Ware offers a more nuanced interpretation and one which mirrors our contemporary understanding of the difficulties of using terms such as ‘Danes’ and/or ‘Norwegians’ in a period when Denmark and Norway were not yet fully formed as political entities.[72] Ware (like Keating) prefers the use of an overarching generic term and his explanation bears striking similarities to contemporary twenty-first century preference for the all-encompassing term ‘Scandinavian’.[73] Quoting the De Veteribus Epistolarum Hibernicarum of his mentor, James Ussher (1581–1656), Ware relates the following:
‘The Easterlings of Ireland were also call’d by other Names, Danes, Norwegians and Normans; which, as the learned know (they are the words of Usher) was a Name common to all the people of Denmark, Norway, Livonia, and the rest of the Northern Nations’.[74]
Ware’s subsequent indiscriminate use of these terms indicates their inter-changeable meaning for him. In essence, for Ware, ‘Easterlings’ was the equivalent of ‘Scandinavian’ to us. He might draw attention to the similarity between mounds found in Denmark and Ireland, and Danish funerary practices in Dublin, but that did not imply a solely Danish origin to the Viking settlers.[75]
Ware, using an annalistic approach to record the deeds of the original ‘three brothers’, notes that in 853 ‘Amlavus or Amelaus with a great Fleet of Danes and Norwegians landed in Ireland, to whom all the Danes then in Ireland submitted’.[76] Following the annals, he touches briefly on the campaigns of ‘Amlavus’ and ‘Ivarus’ in Meath (856), Munster (857), Meath again (859), Armagh (869), until 870 when, as he records (citing ‘Florilegus and other writers of the affairs of England), that ‘Amlavus and Ivarus with a Fleet of 200 Sail went to Britain to the Assistance of Hinguar and Hubba, Danes’.[77] They returned to Ireland in 871, with ‘Amlavus’ dying in that year. His brother ‘Ivarus’, who, Ware tells us was ‘King of the Normans of all Ireland’, died the following year. His son, ‘Godfrid’ succeeded him but was subsequently murdered by his brother ‘Sitricus’ in 888.[78]
The activities of three Viking leaders are attested in the Irish annals and they are generally assumed to correspond to Óláf the White [Óláfr inn Hvíti] (fl. 853–871), Ívarr (d. 873) and Auisle/Oisle.[79] There is a dispute about whether Ívarr and his allies/brothers were indeed the leaders or opponents of the ‘Dark Foreigners’ who appeared on the scene in the mid-850s. On the one hand, Colmán Etchingham suggests that the arrival of ‘Amlaíb, son of the king of Lochlann’ might be read as a response to the attacks of the ‘Dubgenti’ on the ‘Finngenti’ – in this reading, Olaf is a representative from ‘Lochlann’.[80] Rather than viewing the Uí Ímair as descendants of the ‘Dubgenti’ of the 850s, he points to tensions between ‘Northumbrian Vikings, identified as ‘Dubgaill’, and descendants of Olaf and Ivar, and concludes that ‘the terms ‘Dubgenti’ and ‘Dubgaill’ … most commonly designate Vikings active in Britain who were primarily Danes or who intervened in Ireland in 851-2 and but occasionally thereafter’.[81] Etchingham suggests that the term ‘Dubgenti’ may equate with a later term ‘Danair’, which is found in Irish annals in the 980s.[82] He argues that ‘Dubgenti’ may have been short-hand for the Danish dynasty of York, while ‘Finngenti’ referred to the Norwegians in Ireland.[83]
This view is contested by Clare Downham who argues that Olaf’s arrival in 853 was a follow up to the initial ‘Dubgenti’ attacks – i.e., far from being a defender of the original Viking settlers (the Finngaills), Olaf and Ívarr were the leaders of a new group of Vikings whose dynasty would straddle the Irish Sea. She likewise points to the difficulties of using loaded terms such as ‘Hiberno-Norwegian’ or ‘Anglo-Dane’ in this period.[84] She concludes that ‘there is little evidence that the battles which raged between Viking factions were ever drawn up primarily along ethnic lines’.[85]
The position of ‘Lochlann’ is, like the terms ‘Finngenti’ and ‘Dubgenti’, also in dispute: Etchingham suggests that it refers to ‘Norway’, while Donnchadh Ó Corráin looks closer to home and argues that ‘Lochlann’ may be read as the Norse territories of the Hebrides and Scotland.[86] Downham, as we have seen, warns of the problems associated with defining the origins of these Viking groups in the first place. Ó Corráin may perhaps be closer to the mark here, as it is striking that later members of the Uí Ímair dynasty demonstrated a tendency to look to the Hebrides for allies in their wars against Irish kings: certainly Sitriuc Silkbeard (d. 1042) concentrated on the Hebrides and Orkneys in the run up to the Battle of Clontarf.
Historians such as David Dumville and Clare Downham have chosen to avoid the Scylla and Carybdis of ‘Dubgenti’ meaning ‘Danes’ and ‘Finngenti’ referring to ‘Norwegians’ by suggesting that the terms simply be read as referring to different dynasties – and certainly the Uí Ímair were the new dominant dynasty from 853 onwards.[87] Ímar (Ívaar) is sometimes linked with the famous Ívarr inn Beinlausi, Ívaar the Boneless, who played a major role in the Great Heathen Army in England in the 860s.[88] A complicating factor here is that the dynasty of Ívaar ruled in both York and in a number of cities in Ireland.[89] Following the death of Ívaar in 873, the dynasty’s powers in Ireland were somewhat on the wane: internal dissension and push back from Irish kings eventually led to an expulsion from their power base, Dublin, in 902. However, by 917, a grandson of Ímar (Ívaar), called Sitriuc Cáech (Sigtryggr) (d. 927), was back in Ireland, harrying Leinster. Four years later, in 921, he would become king of York.
Sir James Ware, De Hibernia & antiquitatibus ejus, disquisitiones (London, 1658), p. 153. Image of a coin minted in York in the early 940s by Amlaíb (Óláfr) Cuarán (d. 981), son of Sitriuc Cáech (Sigtryggr) (d. 927) and father of Sitriuc Silkbeard (Sitric, Sigtryggr Ólafsson Silkiskeggi) (d. 1042), king of Dublin.
Hanmer provides a little more information (excerpted from the Polychronicon, Grafton and Caradoc Llancarvan), about one of the Uí Ímair descendants of the early tenth century who he calls, ‘Hawlaffe, King of Ireland’, who was one of seven kings defeated by Æthelstan [Athelstan] (893/4–939), king of England, at the battle of Brunanburh in 937.[90] Here he means Amlaíb (Óláfr Godfridsson) (d. 941), king of Dublin and York, a son of Gofraid ua Ímair, the last surviving grandson of Imar. Hanmer states that ‘Howlaffe’ was the ‘son of Sutricus’ but he has (understandably) gotten mixed up in the complex Uí Ímair genealogy for the Amlaíb at the battle of Brunanburh was a first cousin of a later king of Dublin and (briefly) York, Amlaíb Cuarán, son of Sitriuc Cáech (Sigtryggr), king of Dublin and York, another grandson of Ívaar.[91]
Keating perhaps suggests continuity between ‘Turgesius’ and the Uí Ímair when he recounts a story about a ‘Sitric the Son of Turgesius’ and his cunning plan to get the better of Ceallachan, king of Cashel.[92] It is likely he takes this from Caithréim Chellacháin Chaisil, an Eoganacht panegryric written in the first part of the twelfth century in praise of Cellachán mac Buadacháin (d. 954), called Cellachán Caisil. But whether his ‘Sitric’ is a member of the Uí Ímair is unclear, though it was clearly an oft-repeated name in the Uí Ímair dynasty.
Sitriuc Silkbeard (Sitric, Sigtryggr Ólafsson Silkiskeggi) (d. 1042), king of Dublin.
Apart from, Sitriuc Cáech, perhaps the most famous ‘Sitriuc’ of the Uí Ímair dynasty was Sitriuc Caech’s grandson, Sitriuc Silkbeard (Sitric, Sigtryggr Ólafsson Silkiskeggi) (d. 1042), king of Dublin. In many ways the alternate spellings of Sitriuc Silkbeard’s name represent the man himself for here was a cunning leader who would use his Viking heritage and his Irish relatives to further his own political aims. Sitriuc Silkbeard was the son of Amlaíb (Óláfr) Cuarán (a son of Sitriuc Cáech), and Gormlaith, (d. 1030), the daughter of Murchad (d. 972), a king of Leinster of the Uí Fháeláin lineage of northern Leinster, and hence sister of Máel-Mórda, king of Leinster.[93] Sitriuc Silkbeard thus embodied the concept of ‘Hiberno-Norse’ and, if anything, the ‘Hiberno’ element of his upbringing was to prove especially influential – certain many of his alliances were with his Leinster kindred, especially his uncle, Máel-Mórda, king of Leinster. Equally, as we known from both Irish sources and the Orkneyinga saga, in 1014 he made an important alliance with the Isles and Orkney under the leadership of Earl Sigurd the Stout of Orkney (d. 1014), in order to bring Scandinavian reinforcements to the Battle of Clontarf. Kristen Mercier rightly calls Sitriuc the ‘last successful Uí Ímair king in Dublin because he was capable of utilizing aspects from both halves of his ethnic identify’.[94]
Sitriuc Silkbeard has often been overshadowed by some of his more blood thirsty ancestors but he was an interesting figure in his own right and in many ways, a more strategic leader than earlier members of the Uí Ímair. He is best known today for his defeat at the famous Battle of Clontarf but there is, I would suggest, far more to Sitriuc Silkbeard than that and in some ways, Worth’s books point to Sitriuc’s real significance.
Nils Keder, Nummorum. in. Hibernia. antequam. haec. insula. sub. Henrico. II. Angliae. Rege. Anglici. facta. sit. juris. cusorum. indagatio. per. Nicolaum. Keder. … Accessit catalogus nummorum Anglo-Saxonicor. & Anglo-Danicor. musei Kederiani (Leipzig, 1708), plate II, nos. 13-17: images of Sitriuc Silkbeard (Sitric, Sigtryggr Ólafsson Silkiskeggi) (d. 1042), king of Dublin.
These image of Sitriuc Silkbeard comes from Worth’s copy of Nils Keder’s Nummorum. in. Hibernia. antequam. haec. insula. sub. Henrico. II. Angliae. Rege. Anglici. facta. sit. juris. cusorum. indagatio. per. Nicolaum. Keder. … Accessit catalogus nummorum Anglo-Saxonicor. & Anglo-Danicor. musei Kederiani (Leipzig, 1708). Nils [Nicolas] Keder (1659–1735), was a Swedish numismatist, who not only amassed his own coin collection but was also employed by King Karl XI of Sweden (1655–97), to catalogue the Swedish royal collection, following Karl XI’s reclaiming of some of the coin collection of Queen Christian of Sweden (1626–89), which had been pawned in Amsterdam.[95] Keder was responsible for a number of small publications in the first decade of the eighteenth century which Worth bought, including this text. Plate II numbers 13-17 depict Sitriuc around the mid-990s – Clarke estimates that these coins were minted in Dublin c. 997. As he notes, ‘Sitriuc was the first king in Irish history to have his name and image broadcast, at home and abroad, in this manner’.[96] Here we see Sitriuc depicted as a beardless man and the words ‘SIHTRIC REX DYFLINN’ literally stamp his authority on the proceedings.
While Ware includes a coin minted by Sitriuc Silkbeard’s father, Amlaíb (Óláfr) Cuarán (see above), during his first reign at York (941–44), his son Sitriuc was the first king in Ireland to mint coinage. This plate of the coinage of Sitriuc Silkbeard points to the important role of trade in the rise of Viking Ireland. Giraldus had emphasised that the Ostmen were merchants and certainly the Viking towns imported a wide range of goods, goods which soon became essentials to the native Irish. The Vikings developed ports at Dublin, Wexford, Waterford and Limerick and used them to connect via the seaways with markets far and wide.
The decision of Sitriuc Silkbeard to introduce coinage to Viking Dublin not only points to the role of Viking Dublin as a great entrepot in the sea trade of the Vikings.[97] It also shows us the ambition of these ‘Hiberno-Norse’ rulers of Dublin. As Hudson notes, ‘The production of coinage testifies to the administrative sophistication of Sitric Silkbeard’s government’.[98] He came to the throne in 989 and continued as king until 1036. Far from dying at the Battle of Clontarf (as Hanmer suggests), he survived the encounter, later went on pilgrimage to Rome (1028), and on his return became the founder of Christchurch cathedral.[99] Off and on (and more on than off), Sitriuc reigned in Dublin from 989 to 1036 – a long reign. Apart from the length of his reign his career is reminiscent of the most successful Viking of them all, Cnut the Great (d. 1035) – with whom Sitriuc may have been in contact. He was clearly very much aware of Cnut’s stellar career in Denmark, Norway and England and the two would later co-operate on campaigns in Wales.[100]
Sitriuc’s career has perhaps unjustly been overshadowed by the Battle of Clontarf and subsequent accounts of the battle in later sagas – sagas which highlighted the death of Earl Sigurd, and the Cogad which portrays Sitriuc as less than heroic, sitting out the battle in Dublin.[101] As Howard B. Clarke notes, if indeed he did so it would not have been entirely surprising, given his experiences of the aftermath of the battles of Tara (980) and Glen Mama (999) when Dublin was sacked following each battle. Defending the city in 1014 against a post-battle sack by either the Brian Bórama and/or Máel Sechnaill II of Meath (948–1022), would have been a wise move. Sources are not in unison about his role during the battle – the only fact we can be sure of is that he survived. And that, essentially, was what Sitriuc was good at – surviving. Howard B. Clarke rightly states that Sitriuc ‘was not always successful, but in a manner of speaking he was outstanding, not least as a great survivor’![102]
Brian Bórama (Bóruma, Boru) (d. 1014), high-king of Ireland.
Geoffrey Keating, The general history of Ireland (Dublin, 1723), frontispiece of Brian Bórama (Bóruma, Boru) (d. 1014), high-king of Ireland.
Worth’s sources, particularly the histories of Hanmer, Keating, Ware and Walsh, have a lot to say about the Battle of Clontarf, much of it contradictory.[103] Undoubtedly for Keating, the hero of Clontarf was Brian Bórama (Bóruma, Boru) (d. 1014), high-king of Ireland. This frontispiece image of Brian, from Keating’s The General History of Ireland, emphasises Brian’s claim to be ‘Imperator Scotorum’, a title he famously claimed during a visit to Armagh. We see the harp symbol of Ireland and on his shield, the three lions – a nod to the royal coat of arms of England. Beside him we see an ancient crown – the significance of which Keating’s translator, Dermot O’Connor (c. 1690–c. 1730), drew attention to in his preface:
There has been a Dispute among the learned Men, whether the ancient Kings of Ireland of the Milesian Race, wore Crowns of Gold after the Manner of other Nations. We are inform’d by Hector Boetius in his second and tenth Book, that the Kings of Scotland from the Time of Fergus to the Reign of Achaius, used a plain Crown of Gold militaris Valli forma, in the Form of a military Trench: And it is more than probable, that in this Practice they followed the Irish Monarchs from whom they derived their Descent and Customs. And this Conjecture is still rend’d more reasonable by a Golden Cap supposed to be a Provincial Crown that was found in the year sixteen hundred ninety two, in the Country of Tipperary, at a Place call’d Barnanely by the Irish, and by the English the Devil’s Bit; it was discover’d about ten Foot under Ground by some Workers that were digging up Turf for firing. This Cap or Crown weighs about five Ounces; the Border and the Head is raised in Chasework in the Form here represented; and it seems to bear some Resemblance to the close Crown of the Eastern Empire, which was composed of the Helmet together with a Diadem, as the learned Selden observes in his Titles of Honour Part I. Chap. 8.[104]
For his detailed study of Brian, Keating primarily used the twelfth-century panegyric Cogad Gáedhel re Gallaibh, which was written early in the twelfth century and certainly no later than 1118 (possibly between 1103 and 1113).[105] Cogad was written for a Dál Cais king of Munster, in praise of the ultimate Dál Cais king of Munster, Brian Bórama. The text therefore presents us with a one-sided portrayal of the rise of the Dál Cais, and, especially, the godly rule of Brian. For Keating, Brian was the ultimate Christian hero, fighting off the heathen Vikings, and Clontarf was an historic victory over a Viking onslaught, the culmination of a campaign by Brian Bóruma. Brian’ death, at the hands of an ‘apostate from the Isle of Man’, could thus be viewed as a Christian martyrdom.[106]
But to view the Battle of Clontarf as a struggle between Christian Irish and Heathen Vikings is far too simplistic. By the time of the Battle of Clontarf, a steady process of acculturation had taken place, and with it the rise of Hiberno-Norse cities, ruled by Christian descendants of the Uí Ímair. Following his defeat at the Battle of Tara in 980 Amlaíb Cuarán had retired to the Christian centre of Iona and, as Ó Corráin states, ‘there is no reason to doubt that his sons and successors, Glún Iairn (980-989), and Sitriuc Silkenbeard (989–1036, d. 1042), were Christian kings’.[107] Indeed, Dáibhí Ó Cróinín goes so far as to call Sitriuc ‘a paragon of Christian virtue’, pointing to his subsequent foundation of Christ Church Cathedral.[108]
Keating leans heavily on the Cogad as a source and therefore tracks the spectacular rise of the Dál Cais from relatively lowly kings in Limerick-Clare to be, in Brian’s case, high-king of Ireland. The Munster viewpoint of both the Cogad and Keating’s other principal text for the period, Caithréim Chellacháin Chaisil, is readily apparent in its descriptions of previous Viking raids.[109] For example, the Cogad tells us that ‘The whole of Munster became filled with immense floods, and countless sea-vomitings of ships, and boats, and fleets, so that there was not a harbour, nor a landing-port, nor a dún, nor a fortress, nor a fastness, in all Munster, without fleets of Danes and pirates’.[110] Keating, following the Cogad, portrays Brian’s principal aim as being the expulsion of the ‘Ostmen’, the descendants of the Uí Ímair dynasty. There is, however, a slight problem with this interpretation for among the troops fighting for Brian at Clontarf there were, as Dáibhú Ó Cróinín notes, Vikings from Limerick.[111] Brian’s brother Mathgamain had defeated Ívarr, king of Limerick, at the battle of Solloghed, Co. Tipperary, in 967, and ten years later Ívarr and his two sons were defeated and killed by Brian on Scattery Island, breaking Viking rule in Limerick.
If expulsion of the descendants of the Uí Ímair dynasty was indeed Brian’s aim, the Battle of Clontarf was a pyrrhic victory for him, for, as the Orkneyinga Saga succinctly puts it, ‘although King Brian won the victory, he lost his life’.[112] When the opposing forces met at Clontarf on 23 April 1014 Brian was killed by an ally of Sitriuc’s in the aftermath of the battle – a battle which otherwise would have been a very bloody victory for Brian. Brian and his forces had fought off a large force, which combined the Dublin Vikings, Leinster-men under Máel-Mórda, and a large host of Vikings emanating principally from Orkney, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Man, but if the aim had been to displace Sitruic and the Vikings of Dublin, Brian failed – and with his death, the Dál Cais lost their hold on the high-kingship, which Máel-Sechnaill II of Meath speedily regained. The meteoric rise of the ‘Imperator Scotorum’, Brian Bórama, and with him the Dál Cais was at an end. Crucially though, as Sean Duffy reminds us, Brian had broken ‘the Uí Néill monopoly on the high-kingship, thereby shaping the course of Irish history for the next 150 years’.[113]
He had done something else – he had fought off a major invasion of Vikings. The Battle of Clontarf was international in character in part due to Sitriuc’s contacts, primarily in the Hebrides and Orkney.[114] Keating, using the Cogad Gáedhel re Gallaibh, argued that it was Máol-Mórda of Leinster who contacted the ‘King of Denmark’ but this is challenged by sources such as the Orkneyinga Saga who report that it was Sitriuc who was pulling the international levers. Or at least seen to be doing so, for, as Hudson suggests, one way of looking at Earl Sigurd’s involvement at Clontarf is to view it in the context of a struggle with Brian Bórama for supremacy for control of the Irish sea trade.[115] There were even greater dangers looming on the eastern horizon: the timing of the battle must be read with an eye to the international situation – and especially the political upheavals in England where Swein Forkbeard (d. 1014), had conquered England, only to die on 3 February 1014, before he could be crowned.[116] While some of his army would have returned to Denmark with his son, Cnut, there were other mercenaries who were ready, willing, and able to take part in a fight in Ireland.[117] Both Brian Bórama and Sitriuc would have been very aware of events in England and, more generally, the potential involvement of Scandinavian Vikings in Irish wars. As Downham notes, already in the mid-980s Scandinavian forces, called ‘Danair’ by the annalists, were appearing in the Irish Sea and in 990 Dublin Vikings, Leinster-men and some of these Scandinavians combined forces to attack Meath.[118] The extent of Danish successes in England under Forkbeard and the consequent upheaval following his death would certainly have concentrated minds across the Irish sea. In attacking Dublin and their Leinster allies, Brian may have hoped to stage a pre-emptive strike against dangerous rebels while the Danes were still in disarray following the death of Forkbeard. Even if we grant Cogad’s figures of combatants at Clontarf are hyperbolic, certainly the international component at Clontarf far outweighed Sitriuc’s own forces. They, rather than the Dublin Vikings alone, may have been Brian’s real target. If so, the Battle of Clontarf was indeed, as Keating suggests, a ‘signal Victory’ for the Irish.[119]
Sitriuc too, though he survived the battle, did not emerge completely unscathed for though he and his followers in Dublin had lived to fight another day, it was a weakened rule: Mael-Sechnaill II of Meath sacked Dublin in the following year and, as Downham notes, increasingly during the following decades, Viking power in Ireland was on the decline.[120]
Text: Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library.
Photography: Mr Antoine Mac Gaoithín, Library Assistant of the Edward Worth Lirbary.
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[1] On the Old English see Clarke, Aidan, The Old English in Ireland, 1625–42 (London, 1966).
[2] O’Flaherty, Roderic, Ogygia, or a Chronological Account of Irish Events … Translated by the Rev. James Hely … (Dublin, 1793), p. xvi.
[3] Anon, Illustrissimi & Excellentissimi Ludovici Henrici Comitis Castri-Briennij,… Bibliothecae Ad ejusdem Filium Constantiae in Normanniâ Episcopum pertinentis, Catalogus. A Catalogue of the Library of his Excellency Louis Henry de Lomenie, Count De Brienne … (London, 1724).
[4] Barry, John and Hiram Morgan (eds), Great Deeds in Ireland. Richard Stanihurst’s De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis (Cork, 2015), p. 105.
[5] Breen, Aidan, ‘Colum Cille (Columba) (c. 521–597), founder of the monastery of Iona’, Dictionary of Irish Biography.
[6] Cunningham, Bernadette, “The Most Adaptable of Saints’: The Cult of St Patrick in the Seventeenth Century’, Archivium Hibernicum, 49 (1995), 83.
[7] Ware, Sir James Two histories of Ireland. The one written by Edmund Campion, the other by Meredith Hanmer (Dublin, 1633), p. 37.
[8] Ryan, Salvador, ‘Steadfast saints of malleable models? Seventeenth-century Irish hagiography revisited’, The Catholic Historical Review, 91, no. 2 (2005), 253.
[9] Ryan, ‘Steadfast saints of malleable models?’, 251–77.
[10] O’Connor, Thomas, ‘Messingham, Thomas (c.1575–1638?), church reformer, hagiographer, and third rector of the Irish College, Paris’, Dictionary of Irish Biography.
[11] O’Connor, Thomas, ‘Towards the Invention of the Irish Catholic Natio: Thomas Messingham’s Florilegium (1624)’, Irish Theological Quarterly, 64 (1999), 162.
[12] On this see Cunningham, Bernadette, “The Most Adaptable of Saints’, 82–104.
[13] Cunningham, ‘The Most Adaptable of Saints’, 98.
[14] Ryan, ‘Steadfast saints of malleable models?’ 256.
[15] Ibid., 257.
[16] McCafferty, John, ‘The communion of saints and Catholic reformation in early seventeenth-century Ireland’, in Robert Armstrong and Tadgh Ó hAnnracháin (eds), Community in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2006).
[17] Cunningham, ‘The most adaptable of saints’, 95.
[18] Ware, Sir James, Two histories of Ireland, pp 43-4.
[19] McCafferty, John, ‘Brigid of Kildare: Stabilising a Female Saint for Early Modern Catholic Devotion’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 50, no 1 (2020), 64.
[20] Ibid., 67.
[21] Ibid., 55.
[22] Ibid., 53.
[23] Walsh, Peter, A prospect of the state of Ireland (London, 1682), p. 221.
[24] Ibid., pp 66–7.
[25] Ibid., p. 453.
[26] Walsh, p. 468.
[27] Walsh, pp 468–70.
[28] Barry, C. M., ‘Appropriating Patrick: Keating, Ussher, Toland and the Early Irish Church’, (2015).
[29] Ford, Alan, James Ussher. Theology, History and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England (Oxford, 2007), p. 214.
[30] Shane Leslie, St Patrick’s Purgatory. A Record from History and Literature (London, 1932), p. 21, quoted in Ryan, John, ‘Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, Lough Derg’, Clogher Record, 3 (1975), 14.
[31] On some of these medieval sources see Zaleski, Carol G., ‘St. Patrick’s Purgatory: Pilgrimage Motifs in a Medieval Otherworld Vision’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 46, no. 4 (1985), 469–71.
[32] Wright, Thomas (ed.), Giraldus Cambrensis, The Topography of Ireland, translated by Thomas Forester (London, 1863), p. 35.
[33] Moore-McCann, Brenda, ‘St Patrick in Italy’, History Ireland, 29, no. 2 (March/April) (2021), 19. On the fame of St Patrick’s Purgatory in central Europe see Walsh, Katherine, ‘Bishop John O’Corcoran of Clogher (1383–1389) at the University of Prague, the Purgatorium Sancti Patricii and the Debate about Purgatory in the later Middle Ages’, Clogher Record, 16, no 1 (1997), 7–36.
[34] Haren, Michael, and Yolande de Pontfarcy, The Medieval Pilgrimage to St Patrick’s Purgatory: Lough Derg and the European Tradition (Clogher, 1988).
[35] Ware, Sir James, The antiquities and history of Ireland, by the Right Honourable Sir James Ware, Knt. … (London, 1705), p. 97.
[36] Purcell, Mary, ‘St. Patrick’s Purgatory: Francesco Chiericati’s Letter to Isabella d’Este’, Seanchas Ardmhacha: Journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society, 12, no 2 (1987), 2.
[37] On the differences between the 1654 and 1658 editions of Ware’s work see Boran, Elizabethanne, ‘Ireland’s Camden? Sir James Ware’s De Hibernia et Antiquitatibus eius, Disquisitiones and antiquarianism in seventeenth-century Ireland’, in Pietrzak, Witold Konstanty and Magdalena Koźluk (eds), Le Cabinet du curieux. Culture, savoirs, religion de l’Antiquité à l’Ancien Régime (Paris, 2013), pp 261–77.
[38] Ware, The antiquities and history of Ireland, p. 99.
[39] Ibid., p. 97.
[40] Ware, Sir James, Two histories of Ireland, p. 39. On the popularity of St Patrick’s Purgatory during the early modern period see McNally, Fiona Rose, ‘The evolution of pilgrimage practice in early modern Ireland’ M. Litt. (National University of Ireland, Maynooth, 2012).
[41] Ware, Sir James, Two histories of Ireland, pp 40-2.
[42] Ibid., p. 42.
[43] Barry, John and Hiram Morgan (eds), Great Deeds in Ireland, p. 139.
[44] Ware, Sir James, Two Histories of Ireland: Doctor Hanmer’s Chronicle, p. 86.
[45] Ibid., p. 106.
[46] Ibid.
[47] Cunningham, Bernadette, The world of Geoffrey Keating. History, Myth and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2000), p. 49.
[48] Ibid., p. 100: As Cunningham notes, Keating undermined his argument by mixing Caesarius Heisterbacensis up with Caesarius of Arles (c. 470–543); Keating, Geoffrey, The General History of Ireland (Dublin, 1723), pp x–xi. Interestingly, a book mark scrap between these pages suggests that Worth may have been interested in this dispute.
[49] Cunningham, The world of Geoffrey Keating, p. 92.
[50] McBride, Patrick, ‘Saint Patrick’s Purgatory in Spanish Literature’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 25, no 98 (1936), 288.
[51] Manning, Conleth, ‘The earliest plans of Clonmacnoise’, Archaeology Ireland, 8, no 1 (1994), 18.
[52] Ibid., 19.
[53] Hudson, Benjamin T., ‘Turges [Thorgest, Thorgils, Thurkill] (d. 845)’, ODNB.
[54] On varying interpretations of the Uí Ímair see Hudson, Benjamin, Viking pirates and Christian princes. Dynastry, Religion, and Empire in the North Atlantic (Oxford, 2005) and Downham, Clare, Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland. The Dynasty of Ívarr to A.D. 1014 (Edinburgh, 2007).
[55] Wright, (ed.), Giraldus Cambrensis, The Topography of Ireland, translated by Thomas Forester, p. 85.
[56] Ware, The antiquities and history of Ireland, p. 59.
[57] Ware, Sir James Two histories of Ireland, p. 52.
[58] See Etchingham, Colmán, “Names for the Vikings in Irish annals”, in Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, and Timothy Bolton (eds), Celtic-Norse relationships in the Irish Sea in the Middle Ages 800-1200 (Leiden, 2014), pp 25–6, for the use of ‘Nordmanni’ in Irish annals.
[59] Ware, Sir James Two histories of Ireland, p. 53.
[60] Ibid., p. 49.
[61] Ware (ed.), Two Histories of Ireland, Doctor Hanmer’s Chronicle, p. 83.
[62] Ibid., p. 84.
[63] Wright, (ed.), Giraldus Cambrensis, The Topography of Ireland, translated by Thomas Forester, p. 85.
[64] The Annals of Ulster, online via Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition (CELT).
[65] Keating, The General History of Ireland, (Dublin 1723), pp 49-50.
[66] Keating, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, available on CELT.
[67] On the translating of Foras Feasa in English see Caball, Marc, and Benjamin Hazard, ‘Dynamism and decline: translating Keating’s “Foras Feasa ar Éirinn” in the seventeenth century’, Studia Hibernica 39 (2013), 49-69.
[68] Keating, Geoffrey, The General History of Ireland (London, 1723), p. 443.
[69] Keating, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, available on CELT.
[70] Keating, The General History of Ireland (London, 1723), p. 444, and Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, available on CELT.
[71] Ware, The antiquities and history of Ireland, p. 19.
[72] Downham, Clare, ‘Hiberno-Norwegians’ and ‘Anglo-Danes’: anachronistic ethnicities and Viking Age England’, Medieval Scandinavia, 19 (2009), 142.
[73] On this see Downham, Clare, ‘Hiberno-Norwegians’ and ‘Anglo-Danes’: anachronistic ethnicities and Viking Age England’, Medieval Scandinavia, 19 (2009), 139–69, and her note on ethnicity and Viking age politics in Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland. The Dynasty of Ívarr to A.D. 1014 (Edinburgh, 2007), pp xv–xx.
[74] Ware, The antiquities and history of Ireland, p. 56.
[75] Ibid., p. 152.
[76] Ibid., p. 59.
[77] Ibid., p. 60.
[78] Ibid.
[79] Mac Shamhráin, Ailbhe, ‘Ímar (Ívaar) (d. 873), son of Gofraid’, Dictionary of Irish Biography.
[80] David Dumville links the arrival of the ‘Dubgenti’ and the dynasty of the Imar: Dumville, David, ‘Old Dubliners and New Dubliners in Ireland and Britain: a Viking-age story’, in Sean Duffy, (ed.), Medieval Dublin, 6 (2005), 83–4; Etchingham ‘Names for the Vikings in Irish annals’, pp 34–5.
[81] Etchingham ‘Names for the Vikings in Irish annals’, pp 36–7.
[82] Ibid., p. 30.
[83] Ibid., p. 31.
[84] On this see Downham, Clare, ‘Hiberno-Norwegians’ and ‘Anglo-Danes’: anachronistic ethnicities and Viking Age England’, Medieval Scandinavia, 19 (2009), 139–69.
[85] Ibid., 166.
[86] Etchingham, ‘Names for the Vikings in Irish annals’, p. 33. Ó Corráin, Donnchadh, ‘Vikings in Ireland and Scotland in the ninth century’, pdf on CELT website. Calare Downham points out that ‘Laithlinn’ and ‘Lochlann’ might mean different things at different times: Downham, Clare, ‘Hiberno-Norwegians’ and ‘Anglo-Danes’: anachronistic ethnicities and Viking Age England’, Medieval Scandinavia, 19 (2009), 152.
[87] Dumville, David, ‘Old Dubliners and New Dubliners in Ireland and Britain: a Viking-age story’, in Sean Duffy, (ed.), Medieval Dublin, 6 (2005), 83.
[88] Costambeys, Marios, ‘Ívarr [Ívarr inn Beinlausi, Ingwaer, Imhar] (d. 873)’ ODNB.
[89] On the role of the descendants of Ívarr as kings of Dublin and York see Downham, Clare, Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland. The Dynasty of Ívarr to A.D. 1014 (Edinburgh, 2007). For an alternative view see Benjamin Hudson, Viking pirates and Christian princes. Dynastry, Religion, and Empire in the North Atlantic (Oxford, 2005).
[90] Ware, Sir James, Two Histories of Ireland: Doctor Hanmer’s Chronicle, p. 88.
[91] Ibid.
[92] Keating, The General History of Ireland, (Dublin, 1723), p. 74.
[93] Clarke, Howard B., ‘Sitriuc Silkbeard (Sitric, Sigtryggr Ólafsson Silkiskeggi) (d. 1042), king of Dublin’, Dictionary of Irish Biography.
[94] Mercier, Kristen, ‘The Socio-Political Networks of Sitric Silkenbeard. The Foreign Kings of Dublin 980 to 1054’, MA in Philosophy (University of Oslo, 2017), p. 6.
[95] Malmer, Britta, ‘Nicolas Keder, 1659-1735), Numismatist’, Swedish Biographical Dictionary.
[96] Clarke, Howard B., ‘Sitriuc Silkbeard (Sitric, Sigtryggr Ólafsson Silkiskeggi) (d. 1042), king of Dublin’, Dictionary of Irish Biography.
[97] On Dublin at this time see Clarke, Howard B., Sheila Dooley and Ruth Johnson, Dublin and the Viking World (Dublin, 2023).
[98] Hudson, Viking pirates and Christian princes, p. 91.
[99] On Sitriuc’s supposed death following Clontarf see Ware, Sir James, Two Histories of Ireland: Doctor Hanmer’s Chronicle, p. 91.
[100] Clarke, Howard B., ‘King Sitriuc Silkenbeard: a great survivor’ in Howard B. Clarke and Ruth Johnson (eds.), The Vikings in Ireland and beyond: before and after the Battle of Clontarf (Dublin, 2015), p. 262. See also Hudson, Benjamin, ‘Knutr and Viking Dublin’, Scandinavian Studies, 66, no. 3 (1994), 319–335.
[101] The Orkeyinga saga does Sitriuc no favours, for its accuses him of staying away from the fight: Pálsson, Hermann and Paul Edwards (eds), Orkneyinga Saga. The History of the Earls of Orkney (London, 1981), p. 38. On the Cogad portrayal of Sitriuc hiding away in Dublin during the fight see Clarke, Howard B., ‘King Sitriuc Silkenbeard: a great survivor’, p. 255.
[102] Ibid., p. 67.
[103] Early modern Irish historians’ approaches to the Battle of Clontarf was explored in a lecture at the Worth Library on 27 March 2024: ‘Writing Medieval History in Early Modern Ireland: aims, annals and antiquities’, delivered by Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library, Dublin.
[104] Keating, The General History of Ireland (Dublin, 1723), pp iii–iv.
[105] Ó Corráin, Donnchadh, ‘The Vikings in Ireland’, p. 41; Downham, Clare, ‘The Battle of Clontarf in Irish history and legend’, History Ireland, 13, 5 (2005), 19–23.
[106] Clarke, Howard B., ‘King Sitriuc Silkenbeard: a great survivor’, p. 253.
[107] Ó Corráin, Donnchadh, ‘The Vikings in Ireland’, p. 43.
[108] Ó Cróinín, Dáibhí, Early Medieval Ireland 400–1200 (London, 2017), p. 280.
[109] Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating, p. 68.
[110] Ó Corráin, Donnchadh, ‘Vikings in Ireland: the catastophe’, in Howard B. Clarke and Ruth Johnson (eds): The Vikings in Ireland and beyond: before and after the battle of Clontarf (Dublin, 2015), p. 489. As Donnchadh Ó Corráin notes, we owe many of our mental images of Vikings to the Cogad, where the Vikings are portrayed as being ‘uniquely destructive’, as opposed to the native Irish, though it is clear from the annals themselves that monasteries were already being attacked even before the Vikings reached Ireland!
[111] Ó Cróinín, Early Medieval Ireland 400–1200, p. 280.
[112] Pálsson and Edwards (eds), Orkneyinga Saga, p. 38.
[113] Duffy, Sean, ‘Brian Boru: Imperator Scotorum’, History Ireland, March/April (2014), 11.
[114] On this see Mercier, ‘The Socio-Political Networks of Sitric Silkenbeard’.
[115] Hudson, Viking Pirates and Christian Princes, p. 97.
[116] On the wider context see Skeie, Tore, The Wolf Age. The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire (London, 2021).
[117] Downham, Clare, ‘Clontarf in the wider world’, History Ireland, March/April (2014), 25.
[118] Ibid.
[119] Keating, The General History of Ireland (Dublin, 1723), p. 95.
[120] Downham, Clare, ‘The Battle of Clontarf in Irish history and legend’, History Ireland, 13, 5 (2005), 19–23.