not only apple-trees, but even vines, are said to have been cultivated by the inmates of the monasteries.

Of the skill of the workers in various metals at this period, as well as of the lapidaries and painters, we are told wonders by the hagiologists, who expatiate at length on the staff of St. Patrick, covered with gold and precious stones, the tomb of St. Brigid at Kildare, surmounted by crowns of gold and silver, and the walls of the church at the same place, adorned with holy paintings. But it is plain that all this luxury of religious ornament, as well as those richly illuminated manuscripts which Dr. O'Connor and others have described, must all be referred to a somewhat later period.

Of the use of war-chariots among the Irish,* in the same manner as among the Britons and the Greeks, some notice has already been taken; and this sort of vehicle was employed also by the ancient Irish for the ordinary purposes of travelling. The self-devotion of St. Patrick's charioteer has made him memorable in our history; and both St. Brigid and Columba performed their progresses, we are told, in the same sort of carriage. There is also a canon of the synod attributed to St. Patrick, which forbids a monk to travel from one town to another, in the same chariot with a female.t

Reference has been made, in the course of this chapter, to the early Brehon Laws, and could we have any dependence on the date assigned to such of these laws as have been published, or even on the correctness of the translations given of them, they would unquestionably be very important documents. Of those published by Vallancey it has been pronounced, by a writer not over-credulous, that they bear strong internal marks of antiquity; and while the comment on the several laws is evidently, we are told, the work of some Christian juris-consults, the laws themselves wear every appearance of being of ancient, if not of Pagan, times. No mention occurs in them of foreigners, or of foreign septs, in Ireland. The regulations they contain for the barter of goods, and for the payment of fines by cattle and other commodities, mark a period when coin had not yet come into general use; while the more modern date of the Comment, it is said, is manifested by its substituting, for such primitive modes of payment, gold and silver taken by weight. Mention is made in them, also, of the Taltine Games and the Convocation of the States; and it is forbidden, under the pain of an Eric, to imprison any person for debt during these meetings.

With the single exception, perhaps, of the absence of any allusion to foreigners, there is not one of these alleged marks of antiquity that would not suit equally well with the state and condition of Ireland down to a period later, by many centuries, than that at which we are arrived; the payment by cattle and the law of the Eric having been retained, as we shall find, to a comparatively recent date.

With respect to the manner in which the Irish laws were delivered down, whether in writing or by tradition, there has been much difference of opinion; and the poet Spenser, in general well informed on Irish subjects, declares the Brehon Law to be "a rule of right unwritten." Sir John Davies, too, asserts that "its rules were learned rather by tradition than by reading." This is evidently, however, an erroneous representation. Without referring to the Collections of Judgments, or Codes of Laws, which are said to have been compiled under some of the heathen princes, we find, after the introduction of Christianity, the Great Code, or Seanchas-More, as it was called, drawn up with the aid, according to some writers, of St. Patrick, but supposed by others to have been of a much later date.

In the seventh century, a body of the laws of the country was compiled and digested, we are told, from the scattered writings of former lawyers, by three learned brothers, the sons of O'Burechan, of whom one was a judge, the second a bishop, and the third a poet.|| The great number, indeed, of Irish manuscripts still extant, on the subject of the Brehon Laws, sufficiently refutes the assertion of Spenser and others, that these laws were delivered down by tradition alone. In the very instance, mentioned by Sir John Davies, of the aged Brehon whom he met within Fermanagh, the information given reluctantly by this old man, respecting a point of local law, was gained by reference to an ancient

fort, and in a garden, are of the same account (as to property, penalty, &c.) as the wealth, or substance of a habitation." Extracted from inedited Brehon Laws, in an Essay on the Rise and Progress of Gardening in Ireland, by J. C. Walker. See Antholog. Hibern., vol. i., and Trans. Royal Acad. vol. iv.

*The king of the Irish Crutheni, or Picts, is described by Adamnan as escaping from the field of battle in a chariot: Quemadmodum victus currui insidens evaserit."

† Monachus et virgo... in uno curru à villa in villam non discurrant.

Leland, Hist. of Ireland, Preliminary Discourse.

Anno Christi 438 et regis Leogarii decimo, vetustis codicibus allisque antiquis Hiberniæ monumentis undique conquisitis, et ad unum locum congregatis, Hiberniæ Antiquitates et Sanctiones Legales S. Patricii authoritate repurgatæ et conscriptæ sunt.-Annal. Mag. IV.

Ware's Writers, chap. iv.

parchment roll," written in fair Irish character," which the Brehon carried about with him always in his bosom.* The truth appears to be, that both tradition and writing were employed concurrently in preserving these laws; the practice of oral delivery being still retained after the art of writing them down was known; and a custom which tended much to perpetuate this mode of tradition, was the duty imposed upon every Filea, or Royal Poet, to learn by heart the Brehon Law, in order to be able to assist the memory of the judge.t

On the whole, whatever may be thought of the claims to a high antiquity of the numerous remains of the Brehon Law that have come down to us, of the immemorial practice of this form of jurisprudence among the ancient Irish, and of the fond, obstinate reverence with which, long after they had passed under the English yoke, they still continued to cling to it, there exists not the slightest doubt. In the fifth century, the Brehons were found by St. Patrick dispensing their then ancient laws upon the hills; and, more than a thousand years after, the law-officers of Britain found in the still revered Brehon the most formidable obstacle to their plans,

CHAPTER XV.

Invasion of Ireland by the Danes-Supposed intercourse with the Northern Nations at an early period. The Black Strangers and the White Strangers.-Reign of King Niell of the Showers. Battle of Almhain.-State of Ireland at this period.-Weakness of the monarchy.-Increasing strength of the Throne of Munster.-Causes of both.-Reign of the Monarch Aidus.-Devastations of the Danes.-Political connexion of the Irish Kings with Charlemagne.-Inroads of the monarch into Leinster.

ACCORDING to the most trust-worthy of English records, it was in the year 787 that those formidable pirates of the north of Europe, known by the general name of Danes, made, for the first time, their appearance upon the coasts of Britain.§ This expedition, which consisted but of three ships, had been, most probably, sent to ascertain the localities and resources of these regions, and to see how far they held forth temptations to the invader and the spoiler. It would appear that the report made by this party, on their return, was of no very encouraging nature, as nearly eight years elapsed before another experiment of the same kind was tried; and the attempts upon the English and the Irish coasts took place nearly about the same time;-the small island of Rechran, at present Raghlin, having been, in the year 795, laid waste by the Danes. T

At what period these nations of the north became for the first time acquainted with Ireland has been a subject of much doubt and controversy among our historians. While, according to some, the calamitous epoch we are now approaching witnessed the first descent of northern adventurers upon these shores, there are others who maintain that traces of habitual intercourse between the people of Ireland and the Lochlans, or Danes, may be discovered in the Irish annals, as far back as the first century of our era.

Letter to the Earl of Salisbury, Collectan. vol. i.

There

"In order to qualify the Filé," says Mr. O'Reilly, " for this important office, the rules for the education of the poetic professors required that every Dos, or poet of the third degree, before he was qualified to become a Cana, or poet of the fourth degree, should repeat, in the presence of the king and the nobles, the Breithe Neimhidh, i. e. the Law of the Degrees or Ranks, and fifty poems of his own composition."-Essay on the Brehon Laws.

1 Chron. Sax.

Usher, Ind. Chron. Some foreign historians date the first of this series of northern invasions so early as the year 700. "Pontanus et Torfæus," says Langebek, "nimis vetustum in illis insulis dominium ab anno 700 circiter tribuerunt."-De Servitiis quæ Reguli Mannia, &c.

Seward, Topog. Hibern. According to the Rev. Mr. Hamilton, however, who has given an account of this island (Letters concerning the Coast of Antrim,) it is at present called Raghery; meaning, as he rather fancifully conjectures, Ragh-Erin, or the Fort of Erin. To this secluded spot Robert Bruce fled for refuge when driven to extremities by the English King; and the remains of a fortress which tradition has connected with his name are still visible on the northern angle of the island.

The annals of Ulster refer to A. D. 747, the date of this attack upon Rechrain, by the Danes, and record as the first achievement of these marauders, the drowning of the Abbot of Rechran's pigs-" Badudh Arascaich ab. Muiccinnse re guil."

The Welsh chronicler, Caradoc of Lancarvan, (whom Usher, in this instance inconsiderably follows,) states the greater part of Ireland to have been devastated in the same year, 795: "Maximam Hiberniæ partem populati Rechreyn quoque vastaverunt." The Danes, however, did not penetrate into the interior of the country until several years later.

is, indeed, no doubt that the appellation Lochlan, or Dwellers on Lakes, by which the Irish, from about the beginning of the ninth century, are known to have designated their Danish invaders, was employed also in their earlier annals to denote some northern nation with which they were at that time in habits of intercourse and commerce. But whether these earlier Lochlanders were of the same race or region with those who afterwards poured from the great Scandinavian reservoir, there appears to be no means of ascer taining.

In proof of the Danes having been the people with whom this early intercourse was maintained, the authority of a number of northern historians has been adduced, according to whose accounts it would seem that, from a period preceding the birth of Christ, a succession of invasions of this island from Denmark had been commenced ;* and that, for some centuries after, a course of alternate hostility and friendship marked the relations between the two countries. Imposing, however, as is the array of northern authorities for this statement, the entire value of their united evidence may be reduced to that of the single testimony of Saxo Grammaticus, from whose pages they have all copied; and it is well known that, for all the earlier portion of this eloquent writer's history, the foundation is as unsound and unreal as Scaldic fable and fallacious chronology could make it. The only circumstance that lends any semblance of credit to the accounts given by northern historians of the early fortunes of Ireland, is the known fact, that the chief materials of their own history were derived from records preserved in Iceland; to which island, inaccessible as it might seem to have been to the rude navigation of those days,t it is certain that a number of Irish missionaries of the seventh and eighth centuries contrived to find their way. We learn, from more than one authentic source, that, when the Norwegians first arrived in Iceland, they found there traces of its having been previously inhabited by a Christian people; and the Irish books, bells, and holy staves, left behind by the former dwellers, sufficiently denoted the religious island from whence they had migrated. The title of Papas, which it appears was borne by them, has led to the conclusion that they must have been Irish priests who had adventurously fixed themselves in this desolate region; and, under the same name, they were found in Orkneys when the Norwegians conquered those islands.

Unless we were to suppose, however, that among the books left by these missionaries in Iceland, there were any relating to Irish history of which the chroniclers consulted by Saxo might have availed themselves, the incident, though curious and well attested, affords but slight grounds for placing reliance on these early northern annals, whose sources of information are known to have been spurious, and to whose general character for extravagant fiction, the few brief notices which they contain respecting Irish affairs can hardly be expected to furnish an exception. Nor is any more serious credit due to them, when they represent Dublin to have been in possession of the Danes a short time before the birth of Christ, than when they assert that London was built by these northern people about the very same period.

Fabulous, however, as are these accounts, yet that, long before either the Danish or even the Saxon invasions, the coasts of the Baltic had sent forth colonies to some of the British Isles, is a fact to which foreign as well as domestic tradition bears testimony. The conjecture of Tacitus, that the people called Picts were a Germanic, or northern race, is confirmed by the traditional accounts of this people, preserved in the chronicles of Britain; and all the early Scandinavian legends concur with the annals of Ireland in intimating, at some remote period, relations of intercourse between the two countries. We have seen, in a preceding part of this work, what almost certain grounds there are for believing that those Scyths, or Scots, who, at the time when Ireland first became known to modern Europe, formed the dominant part of her people, were a colony from some

The Scandinavians were very early practised in navigation; insomuch that the Sueones who occupied anciently the present Sweden and the Danish isles are said by Tacitus to have dwelt in the ocean,-" ipso in oceano."-German. c. 44. See also Pliny, lib. iv. 30.

It is said that these northern navigators carried ravens with them in their expeditions, for the purpose of discovering distant land by the direction of the flight of these birds. See Barrow's Voyages into the Polar Regions.

Mallet's Northern Antiquities, c. ¡¡. By Foster it is supposed that these articles may have been left at Iceland by some of the Norman pirates, who, after plundering Ireland, may have directed their course to the westward with their booty. (Northern Voyages.) The following is the account given of this interesting circumstance in the Antiquitat. Scando. Celt. Before Iceland was inhabited by the Norwegians, there were men there whom the Norwegians call Papas, and who professed the Christian religion, and are thought to have come by sea from the West; for there were left by them Irish books, bells, and crooked staves, and several other things were found which seemed to indicate that they were west-men."

The Danish King, Frotho, who, according to their accounts, seized upon Dublin, at this remote period, found so much wealth, as they tell us, in the royal treasury of that city, that no regular partition of the booty was made, but every soldier was allowed to carry away as much as he pleased.-Pet. Olai, Chronica Reg. Dan.

region bordering on the Baltic Sea which had, a few centuries before, gained possession of this island. From whatever part these Scythian adventurers may have arrived, whether from the Cimbric peninsula, the islands of the Baltic, or the Scandinavian shores, it may be coucluded that with that region the occasional intercourse was afterwards maintained, and those alliances and royal intermarriages formed of which, in our ancient traditions and records, some scattered remembrances still remain.*

With respect to those swarms of sea-rovers who, throughout the dark and troubled period we are now approaching, carried on their long career of havoc and blood, though known most popularly in English history by the general name of Danes, they are but rarely, and not till a late period, thus designated in our annals. By Tigernach, the earliest existing annalist, they are invariably called Gâll, or Strangers; while, in the Annals of Inisfallen, of Ulster, and of the Four Masters, they are styled indifferently either Galls, Gentiles, Dwellers on the Lakes, or Pirates; but, in not more than two or three instances, are they called Normans,† and as seldom Danes.

In the present kingdoms of Sweden and Denmark, including, as the latter does, Norway, was comprised the vast extent of territory which, in those days, poured forth almost its whole population over the waters, and made all the coasts of Europe tributary to its unnumbered Sea Kings. Though confounded, therefore, ordinarily under the general name of Northmen, these daring adventurers, among whom piracy was, as among the Greeks of the Homeric age, accounted an honourable calling, were, it is clear, a miscellaneous aggregate of Norwegians, Danes, Swedes, Livonians, Saxons, and Frisians,‡ whose expeditions, independent respectively of each other, and having no common object but plunder and devastation, kept all the maritime districts of the west of Europe in a state of constant dismay. The only distinction employed by the Irish to denote any difference between the several tribes that invaded them, was that of Black Strangers and White Strangers; and under these distinctive appellations we find two great bodies of these foreigners designated, who, about the year 850, contested fiercely with each other the possession of Dublin and its adjoining territories. It may be remarked as at least a curious coincidence in favour of the opinion of those who regard the Picts, or Caledonians, as of a congenerous race with these later invaders, that the very same distinction was applied to that people by the Romans of the fourth century; who, as we learn from Ammianus, divided them into Ducalidones and Vecturiones, signifying the Black Picts and the White Picts.

Between the political institutions of Britain and Ireland, there existed, at the time when the northern invasions we are about to notice took place, a very strong similitude; rendering them both, perhaps, in an equal degree, incapable of presenting that firm front to an invader which, in countries less parcelled out into dynasties,|| and therefore more compact in will and power, would have been most probably displayed. In the one single kingdom of Northumbria, we find represented, upon a smaller scale, almost a counterpart of those scenes of discord and misrule which form the main action of Irish history in those times; the same rapid succession and violent deaths of most of the reigning chieftains, and the same recklessness of the public weal which in general marked their whole

career.

The two predominant pursuits of the Irish in those days-war and religion-are most strikingly exemplified in the different fates of the successive monarchs, whose uninteresting existence is drily recorded throughout this period. For while most of them, as one of their own historians expresses it, died with swords in their hands, there were also many who, exchanging the camp for the cloister, devoted the close of their days to penitence and seclusion; and the monarch Niell of the Showers, who died in pilgrimage at Iona, was deposited, with three others of his royal countrymen, in the Tombs of the Kings in that island.**

* See p. 65, of this Work.

In one instance (IV. Mag. ad an. 797,) we find the term "Norman" inserted by a more recent hand. La vaste étendue de la Scandinavie étant partagée alors entre plusieurs peuples peu connus, et seulement désignés par des noms généraux, comme ceux de Goths et de Normans, par exemple, on ne pouvoit savoir exactement de quelle contrée chaque troupe étoit originaire."-Mallet, Introduct.

§ See p. 67, of this Work.

During the Heptarchy Britain contained about fifteen kingdoms, Saxon, British, and Scotch; and the kingdom of Kent, the smallest of them all, could at one time boast no less than three kings.

Niell Trassack.-"He was so surnamed, because, as some authors say, in his reign (but more authentic authors say the night he was born,) three Showers, viz. a Shower of Honey, a Shower of Silver (we have some of the same yet in the kingdom, called the twelve grain penny.) and a Shower of Blood, happened in Ireland; and the names of the certain places wherein they fell are mentioned in the Antiquity Books."-Mc. Curtin, Brief Discourse in Vindication of the Antiquity of Ireland.

**The tomb on the southe syde foresaid has this inscription, Tumulus Regum Hybernie, that is, The tomb of the Irland kinges; for we have in our auld Erische cronickells, ther wer foure Irland kinges eirdit in the said tombe."-Monro's Western Isles.

-were

During the century that elapsed previously to this period, notwithstanding the advancement of a great portion of the people in all the knowledge of those times, the character of the civil transactions of the country still continued to be at the same low and barbarous level; and the few efforts made from time to time to get rid of some of the numerous sources of strife,-as in the instance of the odious Boarian tribute, which the monarch Finactha, as we have seen, remitted "for himself and his successors for ever,' rendered unavailing either by the force of old habit, or by new demands of violence and rapacity. Not half a century had elapsed from the time of the renunciation of this tax, when the claim to it was again brought forward by the monarch Fergall; who, A. D. at the head of an army of 21,000 men, invaded Leinster to enforce its payment.f 722. The force assembled by the king of that province to repel this inroad amounted, we are told, to no more than 9000 men; but they were the flower of his kingdom, and were commanded on this occasion by about 100 champions of the highest military re

nown.

A. D.

It was at Almhain, a spot memorable in the Finian songs and legends for having been the residence of the Leinster hero, Fin-Mac-Cumhal, that the shock of the two hos tile armies took place; and, notwithstanding the gallantry of the Lagenian troops, and the inspirations of the better cause for which they fought, their great inferiority in numbers would have rendered the issue but for a short time doubtful, had not an interposition, in which the hand of Heaven was supposed to be visible, given an unexpected turn to the fortunes of the day. On the very first onset of the combatants there ap- 722. peared a holy man, or hermit, among the ranks, who regardless of the dangers that surrounded him, raised his voice in bold and awful denunciations of the impious wrong of which Fergall and his people were guilty, in violating the engagement entered into by his predecessor to abolish the Boarian tribute for ever. Seized with a panic at these denouncements, the royal army almost unresistingly gave way; the monarch him. self, with his select body-guards, to the number of 160 knights, were among the slain; and, of the two armies, no less than 7000, among whom Tigernach§ reckons 200 kings, were among the number slaughtered on that day.

Of the system of policy established in Ireland, from the earliest periods of her history, some account has been given in a preceding part of this work. Bat a few farther remarks, suggested by the events to which we are hastening, will enable the reader to understand more clearly their precise character and course. The nature of the quintuple division of the island, in ancient times, has been variously and somewhat confusedly represented. It may be collected, however, to have been a sort of pentarchy, in which, in addition to the four great provinces of Leinster, Ulster, Munster, and Connaught, was included, as a fifth province, the district called Meath; which, though belonging naturally to Leinster, was set apart, on account of its position in the centre of the kingdom, to form the seat of the monarchy. The limited extent of this portion, as compared with the four other principalities, was supposed to be compensated as well by its commanding position and superior fertility, as by the ample supplies and tributes which, in his capacity of supreme ruler, the King of Tara was entitled to receive from the subordinate princes. In the course of time, however, it was found expedient to extend the limits of the royal domain; and a tract of land taken from each of the other provinces was added to the original territory, forming altogether the country now called Meath and West Meath, with the addition, probably, of a great portion of the present King's County.

The want of a controlling power and influence in the monarchy, as regarded its relations with the provincial governments, had been always an anomaly in the Irish scheme of polity productive of weakness, insubordination, and confusion; and this source of evil, at the time of the irruption of the Danes, had, by a number of concurrent circumstances, been increased. As some modification of the evils of an elective monarchy, measures

* A. D. 693. See p. 144, of this Work.

See c. vii. p. 81, of this Work.

f IV. Mag. ad ann. 718. (Æræ Com. 722.)

Ad ann. 722. Por a similar prodigality of the regal title among the Carthaginians, see Larcher upon Herodotus, Polymn.

Chap. ix. p. 96.

According to some authorities, among whom is Giraldus Cambrensis, the quintuple number of the provinces was made out by the division of Munster into two, North and South, which, together with the other three provinces, Ulster, Connaught, and Leinster, constituted, they say, the Pentarchy. Dr. O'Connor pronounces Meath to have been a sixth portion, adding, somewhat nationally, "Talis fuit Hibernorum Pentarchia."-Prol. 2. 59.

The omission of Meath by Giraldus, in his quintuple division of the kingdom, is thus strongly objected to by Lynch:-" Divisio regni a Giraldo instituta, cum ei Mediam inserere omisit manca est et mutila Media vero, cum extra provinciarum aliarum fines posita et nullius in Hibernia Regis, nisi Monarcha solius imperiis obnoxia sit, ut unum Pentarchiæ reguum à cæteris sejunctum per se constituat necesse est.”— Cambrens. Evers.