ABSTRACT
L if e on the coasts of Northern and Western Europe, during the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, appears to have been passed under the shadow of an unending terror. And not on the coasts on ly; dwellers far inland, if a navigable river happened to be in their neighbourhood, were not exempt from its domination. At any moment a long ship might rise over the eastern horizon, to discharge upon the shore a grim and ruthless crew, greedy for gold, greedy for blood, greedy, in lesser measure, for the honour of their ancient gods, as they went forth to do battle against the f Pale Galilaean ’ who had challenged the supremacy of their Othin and their Th6rr. Driven from their own petty princedoms by the centralizing policy of the kings of Norway, as well as by the limitations of a country unable to support more than a comparatively small population, and at the moment reduced by a sudden climatic deterioration, these raiders had set out to pur sue the ancient and profitable industry of piracy. And wherever they landed, with their great swords wrought by cunning artificers, there were scenes of havoc, of throatslittings, of burnings, of head-breakings, of insatiable plunderings, such as could best be described or imagined by those who saw them re-enacted in the first quarter of the present century. It is probable that by then most of the portable wealth
of Ireland had gravitated into the hands of the monas teries. In a country which had never risen in civilization so far as to circulate coined money, notwithstanding the example of all the neighbouring regions, gifts were neces-
sarily paid in kind; it might be in cattle, it might be in metal ornaments. Sinners, anxiously seeking to purchase salvation, filled the monastic treasuries with bullion, and the expert monastic craftsman melted and re-modelled it into shrines, and vessels, and bookcovers. It cannot be without significance that almost all of the art treasures of the Christian period of Celtic art that have come down to us in Ireland are ecclesiastical in purpose or in origin. Practically the only exception is the long series of brooches, often of great beauty and elegance in form and ornament, but rarely made of any metal more valuable than bronze. This is the more suggestive, when we take it into con sideration along with the wealth of gold ornaments which the Bronze Age has bequeathed, and with the description of regal ornaments in the romantic literature that tells us of the pagan Iron Age. Admittedly we must make allow ance for exaggerations in the latter; we have already seen that the relics of the Iron Age do not encourage us to look for a high level of general artistic culture: but we might have expected a greater variety and richness in personal adornments than is actually the case. Even if the auri ferous gravels had been robbed of all their treasure, the gold must still have been somewhere, bartered from hand to hand. Where did these treasures go, if not into the coffers of the monasteries ? And, as though to corroborate the conclusion, it was the monasteries which had to bear the heaviest assaults of the raiders. Many a precious trinket was carried off. Some of these
have been found, in the native land of the plunderer; buried with him in the futile hope that he might carry them with him to the Valhalla which he had forefancied. In the Museum at Copenhagen, to name but one example, there is a shrine which doubtless once contained the bones or other relics of some Irish saint: but it was ‘ conveyed 1 by a Viking and gifted to his wife, whom, perhaps, it served as a jewel-case: and the lady’s name, Ranuaik, may be read, scratched in Runes on the bottom of the receptacle.1 As time went on, the invaders grew in boldness. At
first swoopers, they became settlers. At the mouths of the great rivers they staked out claims, and established cities. It is surely one of the many anomalies in Irish history that the chief towns, Dublin, Waterford, Limerick, owe their origin to these destroying foemen ; that the establishment of municipal life is the work of an enemy. From these strongholds, the colonist pirates could ply their trade overseas, and could also sail up the rivers to sites far inland in Ireland itself. Clonmacnois, as far from the sea as she well can be, might have counted herself safe : but the Shannon rolls at her doors, and the Norsemen of Limerick controlled the traffic on the river, so that they could take their toll of Clonmacnois no less than of monas teries more accessible. In their raiding of the monasteries the gold and the
other treasures which the Vikings carried off were the least precious possessions of which they deprived them. Far worse was the robbing of their prestige. The common unlettered people, dwelling round a monastic establish ment-people who knew not what to believe other than as they had been taught-these had looked upon the monasteries as being dwellings of men of mystery, who had all the terrors of the unseen world at their call and command. Many were the tales which they had been told, how this or that holy man had been affronted, and how the culprit was forthwith turned into stone, or swal lowed up by the earth, or suffered some other monstrous portent of wrath. And lo, before their very eyes, heathens were slaughtering the monks who had impressed these cautionary tales upon them, were penetrating to their most hallowed sanctuaries, were appropriating sacred ves sels from their very altars, were burning down houses, towers, and churches indiscriminately: and all the time the blue sky smiled overhead, in a sublime unconcern. We cannot blame these bewildered peasants when we read that their veneer of Christian Faith could not always withstand shocks so severe: that many of them, in the words of the Annalists, ‘ forsook their baptism',2 and threw in their lot with the triumphant raiders, whose
T H E M E N OF T H E B A Y S 20 7 successes were such admirable advertisements for the might of Othin and of Thorr. A very similar drama has been enacted in these days of ours. The ecstatic devotion of Russian peasant pilgrims in the Church of the Holy Sepul chre at Jerusalem is recorded in graceful and impressive language by Mr. Stephen Graham; and is one of the unforgettable things of life for any one who saw it, less than thirty years before the time of writing this book. But at a stroke, it has all been swept away. They have seen their churches desecrated, their priests murdered; and no Mount Sinai has vomited forth its avenging flames. Ubi est Deus tuus ? What answer could these poor folk possibly give to the question of the scoffer ? And as the next step, it was very natural for them to
ask themselves, Why should these foreigners derive all the benefit of the demonstrated impotence of Deity ? If the monastic treasures are really to be had for the taking, why not take them ? Whether they argued in these words or not, they certainly acted in accordance with them : there can be no question that a large proportion of the raids, which in those disastrous centuries the monasteries had to endure, were made not by foreign but by native plun derers. The rape of the Book of Kells is a case in point. This
precious volume was kept in a golden shrine that was worthy of it. One night in the year 1006 shrine and book disappeared together from the monastic sacristy.3 This book is now valued for its illuminations. But a thousand years ago it was the gold cover that aroused cupidity, and, for the sake of this, the theft was perpetrated. The thieves cared nothing for the manuscript; this was found hidden under a sod two months and twenty days afterwards, despoiled of its golden case, which was never seen again. Torrents of raging fury have been poured upon Giraldus Cambrensis for certain unkind criticisms of Ireland and its people, of which he was guilty. But, at least, Giraldus could appreciate the beauty and value of an Irish manuscript, and, as we have already heard, he speaks in the loftiest terms of eulogy of the wonderful
book which he saw at Kildare. But the people of Ireland allowed the Kells book to lie out for the better part of three months under their rainy skies, with no better pro tection than a sod : and as for the Book of Kildare, that has vanished for ever. What was the inner history of the re-discovery of the
book ? How did the finders know where to look ? Had the informer already made his appearance in local politics ? We must fear so. In the year 861 the Norsemen pene trated the great mounds of the Boyne cemetery, and appropriated whatever treasures these may have con tained.4 How did they know that those treasures were there ? How did they know where to find the closed-up entrances, which since their time were not discovered till 1699 in the case of New Grange, till the nineteenth cen tury in the case of Dowth, and in the case of Knowth is as yet unknown ? Surely some renegade must have told them the traditions of buried wealth, and of the stillremembered places of the doorways: some one who had sloughed off his old superstitions for a superficial Chris tianity, and who now, with the successes of paganism before his eyes, * forsook his baptism \ Otherwise the raiders would have been obliged to spend fruitless weeks in excavation, which would have left permanent marks on the mounds themselves. Undoubtedly the earliest of the raiders were pagans,
quite possibly enthusiastic pagans. But paganism rarely breeds a missionary spirit, and it is possible to exaggerate the religious fervour of the raiders. Filthy lucre rather than the honour of Othin and Thorr was their primary objective. And it was not very long before a kind of Christianity began to make some impression upon them. It was a Christianity which turned a blind eye to piracy: but it induced them to found churches, and to respect the lives of priests. It is not impossible, as the late W. G. Collingwood claimed,5 that some of the numerous churches dedicated in the North of England to St Patrick were founded by Norsemen who had derived their Christianity from Ireland. In a few cases at least it may
upon the country: considering their ubiquity, vouched for by the records of raids which we may read in any of the books of Annals : considering the towns which they built, Dublin, Waterford, Limerick, to say nothing of smaller settlements such as Annagassan: considering the fact that Dublin was for long the seat of a Norse kingdom: considering that a pirate chieftain called Turgeis established a reign of terror in the centre of the country, maintaining a fleet on the great lake called Loch Ree, and even turning the Cathedral of Clonmacnois into the sanctuary of his witch-wife, who gave oracles seated on the High Altar : considering all these things, the relics of the Scandinavians themselves, as yet discovered, are surprisingly few. All round the city of Dublin the country is dotted with names whose Norse origin is obvious : where are the Norsemen who imposed those names ? We might have expected Viking cemeteries in the neigh
bourhood of their settlements, and numerous Viking graves in the neighbourhood of their raids: for these cannot always have been carried out without casualties. But only one cemetery is known, if the few graves which were found at Island Bridge on the outskirts of Dublin, and which yielded enough material to fill a single case in the National Museum, can be dignified by such a term.6 The finds of individual objects of Scandinavian origin are few : a shelf-full of crudely made silver armlets, with simple geometrical patterns stamped upon them: a fine South German sword, bearing its maker's name damascened upon the blade, and another artificer's name on the hilt, from Ballinderry7 ; but very little else. And yet the influence of the Scandinavian artificers completely revolu tionized the art of the native craftsmen, as we can seeby comparing the abstract geometrical frets of the preScandinavian Ardagh Cup with the thoroughly Scandinavianized Cross of Cong and its exuberant animal decora
tion : the earlier ' High Crosses ' such as those of Monasterboice and Clonmacnois, with the Scandinavianized Crosses at Tuam, Glendaloch, and Dysert O’D ea; or the Gospels of Kells and of Durrow with the late Garland of Howth. (Some of the animal figures in the Book of Durrow show pre-Viking Teutonic influence,8 but not enough to make such a complete inversion of the native styles as we can see in the later works of art.) The native crafts men must therefore have had models on which their revised ideas of art were based: and where are they ? In other regions to which the Scandinavians penetrated,
they left literary monuments of their presence. What ever we may think of the Kensington and other inscrip tions which have been claimed as memorials of the ancient Norse settlers in America,9 there is no doubt that inscrip tions in Runic letters, testifying to their far-reaching activity, have been found in Iceland, Greenland, the Faero Islands, England, Scotland, the Isle of Man, and even in the Piraeus. Why is Ireland so empty of Runes, while the Isle of Man is full of them ? Were the Scandi navian dwellers in that small island all (as I once heard it expressed) ' used to usuT a pen \ while the builders of Dublin, Waterford and Limerick were illiterate ? It is hardly credible. We actually possess three, at most four, Runic inscriptions : why are there not three or four hun dred, as there ought to be, if Ireland had its due propor tion as compared with other countries where the North erners had their settlements ? This question is the more perplexing, seeing that in
other respects the Scandinavian brought a cultural advance into the country. In nothing is this so clearly demon strated as in the use of coined money. The absence of a coinage, the persistence of a barter system down to as late as the tenth century, in which goods were valued, and fines assessed, on the basis of a graduated standard expressed in terms of weights of metal, cattle, and female slaves-this is one of the most difficult obstacles in the path of those who would claim for the country a highly developed ancient civilization. Romans, Gauls, certain of
the South British Celtic communities, Saxons, Welsh, all had coined money, and expressed values in terms thereof. But there is no trace whatever of such an institution in the legal documents, where we naturally seek for light on social antiquities. The anomalous bracteate and other pieces, which have come to light from time to time, are too few in number, and too problematic in character, to affect the question; they cannot disturb the conclusion that there was no regular numismatic currency in the country (other than imported Saxon coins of which a few hoards have been found, and which were most likely treasured as mere bullion) before the Norse kings of Dublin stamped silver pennies with crudely drawn images and usually illegible superscriptions.10 Nor can we satisfactorily account for the absence of
Runic inscriptions by a subsequent iconoclastic vendetta, as we did in explaining the absence of La Tene sculptured monuments. For the evidence of an ultimate Celto-Scandinavian fusion among the ordinary people of the country is too strong to leave room for any such vindictive spirit. The monastic raids were perpetrated by both people alike. The battles were battles of chieftains, not of communities : it would be no more than a mild exaggeration to call even the Battle of Clontarf an incident in a civil war. From the Annals we gather a monotonous record of
plunderings and burnings. Never did a country endure such evils as Ireland did, if we are to accept these records as being the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We may, indeed, accept them as the truth. We may even go so far as to concede that they may be nothing but the truth. But we make endless difficulties for our selves, indeed we reduce the history to incomprehensibility, if we consider that the Annalistic record is the whole truth. A plundered monastery is not the place to which we
should go in search of an impartial description of the plunderers. And the histories which we possess are monastic records, or based upon monastic records, and we cannot blame them if they show a certain bias. Against
them we must set the surprising fact that even as the Vikings are raiding, the monasteries are growing in strength and in activity. Clonmacnois, for example, is burnt over and over again, sometimes by the Scandinavians, but quite as frequently by the men of Munster. And yet it goes on, and no one who can see its long series of memorial slabs can doubt that these incidents, exasperating though they must have been, were no real interruption to the corporate life or activity of the establishment; that, after all, they were comparative trivialities. Only one of those inscriptions gives us a moment's pause (fig. 34) : it com memorates a certain Feidlimid, who has passed unrecorded by the Annalists-to judge by the style of his monument he lived about the end of the ninth century : and beneath his name we may read the words-
But ‘ the rest is silence, unrevealed \ There is nothing to show that this man's death was due to Norsemen, any more than was that of MaelMuire, also of Clonmacnois, to whose scribal craftsmanship we owe much of the precious MS., known as the Book of the Dun Cow, and who met his death in 1106, long after the Vikings had ceased from troubling, in the endeavour to defend the treasures of his alma mater against a band of marauders. Indeed, qui occisus est sine causa is merely another way of saying * this monument was erected by his friends '. In our imperfect world, the application of such terms as ‘ felon' and ‘ mar tyr ' reciprocally, to an executed manslayer and to his victim, tell us all that we need to know about the sym pathies of the several speakers, but throws no light on the abstract morality of the transaction. So that in the end we are left, wondering. Were these
Viking raids as bad, or as frequent, as they are made out to be ? Were they any worse than the native raids, which, no doubt, they were the prime cause in provoking ? There are many indications that an assimilation between the Scandinavian settlers and the native Irish began to
MaelShechlainn, having rid himself of Gormfhlaith, next proceeded to marry his own stepdaughter Mael Muire (see No. 2 above); thus becoming brother-in-law of one of the chief leaders of the Dublin Norsemen. To add to the muddle, this same MaelShechlainn was the son of Domhnall, king of Ireland, and his kinswoman Donnfhlaith : and this Donnfhlaith also married the Norse king Olaf, and by him was the mother of another of the Norse kings of Dublin, who thus was MaelShechlainn's half-brother! In conditions such as the anti-Scandinavian monastic
historians describe, unions like these would surely have been impossible. A prince on either side, who sought to espouse a princess of the opposition, if indeed he escaped being knocked on the head by the family of the lady so soon as he began to make his advances, would before long be assassinated by his own followers, indignant at what
would obviously be a gross act of treachery. We are forced to conclude that the Scandinavians are made into scapegoats by the annalistic chroniclers: that they were not as black as they were painted; and that they did not seriously change for the worse the existing conditions of public safety. The archaeological and historical evi dence would be inexplicable, if the Scandinavians had intro duced nothing but turmoil, unrest, and insecurity to the country. These things were there already. The hidingholes, which we call souterrains, and which are a constant feature of the fortified dwellings so common throughout the country-these are incomprehensible unless we are to suppose that they were made for the safe-keeping of valu ables which might at any moment be carried o ff; and though I myself have made the suggestion, I must admit that the raiders contemplated by the builders of these * funk-holes * were not certainly Scandinavians.* The real crime of the Scandinavians was their destruction of the traditional inviolability of the monasteries. The most conspicuous monuments of the raids of the
Northmen are the famous Round Towers, the places of refuge which were prudently provided in anticipation of their attacks, by the builders of the monastic establish ments. It were waste of time to recapitulate the floods of lunacy which have been outpoured in reference to these structures : let them fall into their long-overdue oblivion. The round towers are primarily ecclesiastical belfries, nothing more and nothing less. They are not even an exclusively Irish possession, for circular cam paniles exist in many places on the continent (that of the Church of Sant' Apollinare at Ravenna, and the ‘ Leaning Tower' of Pisa are notable examples) and in England (as at Bartlow and Snailwell in Cambridge shire). Before the Scandinavians came, bell-towers were unknown in the country. The first campanile built in Ireland, wherever that may have been, happened to be built on a circular plan : the others followed its model. * The most recent research has shown reason to date the origin
plan. It is cheap to build, for there is no necessity to cut well-squared corner-stones. And when it becomes the object of attack, a further advantage comes into view : there are no quoins vulnerable on two faces, and so liable to be prised out with crowbars; and there are not such large areas of the wall entirely out of the ken of the defenders. Doubtless these considerations established the persistence of the circular plan ; but fashion was no less potent in maintaining it. Even when the towers rise from the roofs of their churches, as at St. Kevin's and Holy Trinity in Glendaloch, and in the church of Ireland's Ey near Dublin,* where the question of defence does not enter, the Round Tower still persists. The exotic Cormac's Chapel at Cashel, which dates after the Scandinavian period, and a small church on Inis Clothrann (otherwise Quaker Island) on Loch Ree, are the only churches with rectangular towers, dating earlier than the introduction of the Gothic style. While treating these structures as belfries, we must
remember that we are not to think of towers containing large hanging bells, pulled with ropes, as in a mediaeval or a modem church. The only bells known to early Irish Christianity were the rectangular hand-bells, of which not a few examples remain : and these were sounded by a ringer stationed in the topmost floor of the tower. Bellwindows, usually, though not invariably, four in number, f encircled this ringing-loft. The ringer ascended to his station by means of a ladder: but, as ladders of short lengths are safer, and more easily introduced into such a tower than long ones, the space below the ringing-loft was subdivided into stages or storeys, made of wooden floors supported upon offsets in the interior face of the masonry.
