The North Atlantic Frontier of Medieval Europe

Vikings and Celts

James Muldoon, James Muldoon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351884860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Discussion of medieval European expansion tends to focus on expansion eastward and the crusades. The selection of studies reprinted here, however, focuses on the other end of Eurasia, where dwelled the warlike Celts, and beyond whom lay the north seas and the awesome Atlantic Ocean, formidable obstacles to expansion westward. This volume looks first at the legacy of the Viking expansion which had briefly created a network stretching across the sea from Britain and Ireland to North America, and had demonstrated that the Atlantic could be crossed and land reached. The next sections deal with the English expansion in the western and northern British Isles. In the 12th century the Normans began the process of subjugating the Celts, thus inaugurating for the English an experience which was to prove crucial when colonizing the Americas in the 17th century. Medieval Ireland in particular served as a laboratory for the development of imperial institutions, attitudes, and ideologies that shaped the creation of the British Empire and served as a staging area for further expansion westward.

1
A Note on the Norse Occupation of Ireland¹

Jean I. Young

More than one writer has drawn a sharp contrast between the Viking settlements in Ireland and their counterpart in England.² It is said that in the former country these were limited in extent and exclusive in character, the colonists confining themselves to the chief towns on the coast and their immediate neighbourhood, and preferring shipping to agriculture, since, owing to the strength of the clan system, they were debarred from settling on their own farms, as they did in England. It is possible, however, that in Ireland the Norsemen took to building fortified encampments at various harbours for the same reason that led them in England to till the soil and in Iceland to farm sheep. Wherever the Vikings settled they adapted themselves to their environment in a brilliantly successful manner. And thus in Ireland, whose whole coast is well provided with good natural harbours, they built up a great shipping industry and developed town life. Viking weights and scales have been found near Dublin, and coins of Sihtric Silkenbeard, Norse king of Dublin, in Scandinavia. There are a great many Old Norse loan words in Irish shipping and trading vocabularies of the tenth and eleventh centuries,³ and a tenth-century Irish poem entitled National Characteristics hits off the Norsemen thus: "Sailing across the sea certainly, gluttony of the Norse and their traffic."⁴

In the seventeenth century the Irish historian Geoffrey Keating states that the Irish tolerated the presence of the Norsemen in their midst after the battle of Clontarf, because they stimulated trade,⁵ whilst his contemporary Duald Mac Firbis affirms that most of the Dublin merchants of that time boasted their descent from Olaf Cuaran and the Norsemen.⁶ The impetus the Norsemen gave to town life is clearly indicated by the reference in an eleventh-century poem crediting them with "the gift of habitation and commerce and abundant houses",⁷ and by the modern folk belief that "the architectural remains scattered up and down the country were 'built by the Danes and ruined by Oliver Cromwell'".⁸ Their trading instincts were probably further stimulated by the circumstance that Ireland, then as now, was a pastoral rather than an agricultural country. In her early literature herdsmen, not labourers, represent the lower ranks of society.⁹ The early Celtic church scarcely encouraged agriculture, monasteries being mere collections of beehive huts, and the acquisition of much land or many cattle for the community presenting no attraction for their single-minded inmates. Sometimes each monk provided his own means of subsistence; thus St. Ciaran of Saigir had one cow,¹⁰ St. Maedoc and his two disciples two cows and a calf.¹¹ The sixth-century St. Mochudi owned neither oxen nor plough.¹² The monasteries often seem to have possessed barely sufficient in the way of flocks and estates to keep together body and soul of their inhabitants. We frequently hear of saints working miracles to avert the starvation of the community or, when the need arose, to save the face of their foundation as a centre of hospitality.¹³

The Norsemen's exploitation of the natural harbours of Ireland led to a rapid expansion of the trade which had long existed with France and Spain, and the opening up of commerce with the north European countries and the east. The expansion of trade in turn resulted in the ever-increasing growth in wealth and importance of trading centres and would thus automatically tend to cause the Norsemen to develop coastal rather than inland colonies. Dublin harbour was particularly well situated, being within easy call of vessels not only from neighbouring English ports, especially Bristol, but also from the far north and south. Trade between Ireland and Russia during the early tenth century is indicated by the Icelandic tradition that, at a fair in Norway at that time, a dealer called Gilli the Russian sold an Irish princess to an Icelandic farmer.¹⁴ Communications with France or Spain are hinted at in an Irish poem from the ninth century on the Hill of Allen, which alludes to Dublin's "wine barque on the purple flood",¹⁵ and in another from the tenth or early eleventh mentioning the levy of one hundred and fifty vats of wine made on the Dubliners by Brian Boru.¹⁶ By the middle of the tenth century Dublin had become the most famous port of the western Scandinavian world. We learn from the Icelandic Egilssaga that a young Norwegian who had made Norway too hot for him was advised by a kinsman to sail to Dublin, "since that journey is now accounted the most famous ".¹⁷ Towards the end of the century "many were in the habit of making this (the Dublin) voyage".¹⁸

The appropriation of the coast by the Norsemen does not, however, imply that the area they settled in Ireland was insignificant and that they were isolated from the native population. In the first place it should be noted that coastal place-names of Norse origin are found round the whole of Ireland, though they are somewhat scanty in the barren and thinly populated south and west. In the second place the few inland place-names extant are important and point to fairly large settlements. Donegal, Fingal and Gaultier (a barony near Waterford) all contain the element Gall, "Foreigner", the commonest Irish term for the Norsemen. It is significant that the element -ster in the names of three of the four great provinces of Ireland is derived from the Old Norse staðir (pi. of staðr a place), while the Norse Írland—whence the current Ireland—has supplanted the Irish Ériu (Modern Irish Eire). Moreover, since the kingdom of Dublin (the Dýflinnarskíri of Icelandic sources) at the height of its power extended from the Strangford and Carlingford Lochs in the north to Wat erf or d in the south, and embraced the districts of Fingal and Gaultier, it is clear that considerably more than the immediate neighbourhood of the coastal town was involved.¹⁹ In the same way we find the sway of the Limerick Vikings extending to Cork, Thurles, Cashel, Dun na Trapcharla (the obsolete name of a settlement in County Limerick), Dun na Gall in Connacht, estates on Lochs Ree and Corrib and at least one island in the Shannon.²⁰

At this point it should be observed that the lack of Old Norse inland place nomenclature does not prove that there were no inland settlements. It is notorious that the English counties of Huntingdon and Bedford, which we know from other sources to have been profoundly affected by Scandinavian occupation, show very little trace of this in their place names.²¹ The Scandinavian settlers in Ireland, merchants and seamen though they were, did not live by trade and fishing alone. In every other land where we find the Vikings settled they combined farming of one sort or another with their favourite pursuits of sailing the high seas and buying and selling. That they farmed in Ireland seems indicated by a poem from...