Patrick J. Duffy Fitzpatrick, David Edwards, Elizabeth. Gaelic Ireland: Land, Lordship and Settlement, c. 1250-c. 1650. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001. 454 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-85182-547-9.

Reviewed by Thomas Finan (Departments of History and Religious Studies, Webster University, St. Louis)
Published on H-Albion (July, 2001)

The Lost Gaelic Middle Ages Re-found

The Lost Gaelic Middle Ages Re-found

Gaelic Ireland is one of the most under-studied fields of all medieval history. To be precise, though, Gaelic Ireland refers to that period after the arrival of the Anglo-Normans at the end of the twelfth century. There is no lack of scholarship concerning the period before the Anglo-Normans, but the history, archaeology, and literary history of Gaelic Ireland have been remarkably neglected. The editors and authors of this volume concerning settlement and geography in Gaelic Ireland attempt to respond to this state of affairs with a variety of approaches meant to fill in blanks left by years of neglect, and in the process have produced an exceptional volume that should attract more scholars to such a fertile field waiting to be harvested.

The introduction of the volume, written by Duffy, Edwards, and Fitzpatrick, is valuable if only because of the extensive references found in the footnotes. No book on Gaelic Ireland provides such information. Often other monographs concerning Gaelic Ireland (particularly Gaelic Ireland by Kenneth Nicholls) attempt to inform a general audience and hence have not provided any references; few books on Gaelic Ireland lead new scholars into the discipline by showing the reader where to turn for sources. Nor do many books provide the level of interpretation that explains why the subject of medieval Gaelic Ireland is in the state that it is in. Irish historians have generally blamed the catastrophic fire in the Public Record House in Dublin during the Irish Civil War for the supposed lack of documents comparable to those of Ireland's nearest neighbor, England. But Duffy, et al., rightly point out that the records held in the Public Record Office (while valuable) rarely dealt with Gaelic Ireland, and that most of the materials of Gaelic Ireland had been deposited at the libraries of Trinity College, the Royal Irish Academy, and other learned societies in Ireland. As well, the linguistic difficulties of Middle and Early Modern Irish (which still has no usable grammar) have led some scholars to declare that until more documents are translated by the linguists, we will not be able to piece together medieval Gaelic society. Again, Duffy, et al., show that large bodies of material (including massive collections of bardic poetry) already exist in translation, but few have considered these materials as historic source material. And, finally, following a recent work by Kieran O'Conor, the editors posit that Gaelic Ireland is so understudied because the nation that evolved from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw itself in terms of a non-English identity.[1] As a result, the greater part of the twentieth century was spent investigating the archaeology and history of Early Christian or Early Medieval period in Ireland, as this period was seen as somehow "purely" Irish.

The seventeen essays in the volume address these supposed limitations and do so successfully. I must point out that I would like to summarize all of the essays for this review, as all are vital studies, but I will instead discuss several notable essays as exemplary of the volume itself.

Kenneth Nicholls treats the question of the extent to which Ireland was wooded in the late medieval period, and does so with his usual style, clarity and ability to draw the most out of seemingly disparate sources. Rather than accepting either the commonly held idea that the primeval forests of Ireland lasted the Anglo-Normans and were only destroyed in the Early Modern period as a result of the growing need for wood in the production of iron, or the newer position that Ireland's primeval forests were already consumed by the arrival of the Anglo-Normans, Nicholls describes a complicated system of destruction and re-growth over time, in which the size of the forests was at least modestly related to the stability within Irish society. As a result, for instance, reforestation occurred during the fourteenth century, while by the time of the Tudor reconquest, the forests were exploited in an unsustainable way.

Valerie Hall and Lynda Bunting have successfully used the study of Icelandic volcanic ash in the peat bogs of Northern Ireland to date layers within the bogs with great accuracy. As a result, the pollen found in the layers can also be dated with the same accuracy, such that Hall and Bunting can show what species of plants, grains and trees existed around the bog. Their conclusion, that "...the rural landscape of medieval Ireland was at least as diverse as its modern counterpart...," (pp. 221-2) of course leads to more questions than answers, but hopefully this method can give us a much better picture of the landscape of historic Ireland that has too often been described as simply a wild forested land.

Katharine Simms has spent the better part of three decades describing Gaelic Ireland by analyzing the massive corpus of bardic poetry that is still relatively underutilized by historians. The use of bardic poetry has its difficulties, to be sure, as does the use of any type of literature as historic source. But Simms has a unique gift for extracting meanings from these poems that are often more concerned with flattering a patron than with providing the modern scholar with information. In her article on "the House Poems," she analyzes the vocabulary used by the bardic poets in describing the houses, forts, and "castles" of Gaelic lords. Simms reminds the reader that taking the descriptions of houses at face value is dangerous indeed; the houses are often compared to supernatural places, in which case the analogy is clearly symbolic, while in other cases the vocabulary is simply ambiguous. On the other hand, she surmises that the language used by the bards suggests rather complicated structures within the forts of the Gaelic lords. Her list of bardic vocabulary words analyzed in the article is a very useful tool for archaeologists and historians not acquainted with the intricacies of bardic poetry.

By using a variety of different sources, Elizabeth Fitzpatrick has identified the inauguration sites of two Anglo-Norman lordships, the two factions of the Connacht Burkes, who, during the course of the fourteenth century, adopted Gaelic titles, culture, and language. In frontier regions Anglo-Norman lords adopted Gaelic ways despite the attempts of the Anglo-Norman colonial government to legislate otherwise (as with the Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366). In her article Fitzpatrick argues that the inaugurations of the Mayo Burkes took place at "Ratsecer," and that this site is also identified as the ringfort of Raheenagooagh. While Gaelic lords were prone to using hilltops for their inauguration, it seems that Gaelicized Anglo-Norman lords may have favored ringforts that had gone into disuse. As she admits, Fitzpatrick is on shakier ground when she argues that the inauguration of the Clanrickard Burkes took place at Dunkellin, since in the main the source for this theory is place-name analysis and eighteenth and nineteenth century folklore. Nevertheless, her argument is strong, and leads the reader to question the whole process of associating particular settlement types with particular ethnic identities, or, for that matter, the use of those ethnic identities to begin with!

Kieran O'Conor examines the morphology of Gaelic high-status habitation sites in north Roscommon, a region that was controlled by the MacDermot and O'Conor Gaelic lords of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. These lords used a wide variety of types of fortification and settlement, including crannogs, moated enclosures, and natural islands. No one type of site was used more than the other, but in some cases, such as the MacDermot island fortress at Lough Key and the possible moated site on the shore at Lough Key, these settlement types are often found in very close proximity. Ultimately, his article is a prelude and call for future work; the geographic area that he has researched should yield important information about medieval Gaelic Ireland. The strength of O'Conor's work lies in his ability to weave a narrative between archaeological survey and in-depth analysis of literary sources. Cross-disciplinary analysis can fill gaps in both fields, as O'Conor has shown in this article.

Aidan O'Sullivan surveys the evidence for later medieval occupation of crannogs, or defensive island lake settlements, in Gaelic Ireland. If one considers crannogs from the perspective of the Irish Annals, they seem to be described uniquely as royal residences or defensive refuges. However, based upon recent survey and archaeological analysis, O'Sullivan argues that the crannog is even more enigmatic than we have presumed. Some crannogs were clearly used in manners described in the Annals, but others were used by peasants, or for holding cattle, or as seasonal settlements. He concludes by stating that the most extensive occupation periods of crannogs lie in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and again in the sixteenth centuries. Both were periods of stress and social disorder in Ireland, so perhaps these is more to consider in terms of the crannog's use as a defensive refuge than normative settlement feature.

This volume is a vital contribution to the study of Gaelic Ireland, and must be considered by any scholar of medieval history in the British Isles. It is not without a noticeable fault, however. While the title suggests that the essays cover the period 1250-1650, only four of the essays are even moderately concerned with the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Robin Frame and Sean Duffy have considered the history of medieval Ireland in the thirteenth century in several monographs and articles, but their perspectives generally result from using the administrative records of the Anglo-Norman colony. Both of these scholars have contributed greatly to our understanding of the political history of thirteenth century Ireland, but, as shown in this volume, thirteenth century Gaelic Ireland is often forgotten in terms of culture history or in terms of settlement. One nevertheless gets the feeling from the present volume that "real" Gaelic Ireland began in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. While Ireland was technically divided into English lordships by the end of the thirteenth century, the West and North were never inhabited to the extent of regions like Leinster, eastern Ulster and Munster. Certainly the Gaelic lords in the West and North were not simply dormant from the late twelfth century until the late fourteenth century? Or could there be a tacit assumption that in the thirteenth century the Gaelic lords who employed Anglo-Norman mercenaries and formed political alliances with Anglo-Normans were somehow not Gaelic? Such a question is outside the purview of a book on settlement; but it is nevertheless a question that needs to be answered in light of the fine introduction of Duffy, et al., in this volume.

Four Courts Press has been producing a large number of important new and reprint volumes in Irish medieval history over the last few years, and the Press is to be commended for such a fine book. The editors and authors of this volume, as well, are to be commended for providing starving scholars of medieval Ireland with plenty of food for thought.

[1]. Kieran O'Connor, The Archaeology Medieval Rural Settlement in Ireland (Dublin, Discovery Programme Monographs: 1998); 10.

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Citation: Thomas Finan. Review of Fitzpatrick, Patrick J. Duffy; Edwards, David; Elizabeth, Gaelic Ireland: Land, Lordship and Settlement, c. 1250-c. 1650. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. July, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5279

Copyright © 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.