The Old Irish World

In my book I have given definite reasons for thinking that Davies’ acquaintance with Irish affairs was inadequate – in a short residence in the country of which he did not know the language, the law, or the history. My own judgment is that considering his imperfect means of knowledge, and his very strong bias of prejudice, his statements about Ireland before his coming there have no particular sanctity, and need to be tested and corroborated like those of any other writer. That he is sometimes at fault even a believer such as Mr. Dunlop seems in a hidden way to admit. Suggesting that my references to the cloth trade are not so novel as unwary readers might think, “the excellent quality of Irish wool,” says Mr. Dunlop, “is one of the best attested facts in Irish commercial history.” Then why has Mr. Dunlop until this moment excluded any slightest mention of wool in his summary of Irish trade? Was it too well known? Or was it because of the saying of Sir John Davies – “for wool and wool-felts were ever of little value in this kingdom?” We are here shut into a denial of the well-attested commerce in wool, or to a doubt of the sufficiency of Sir John Davies as a witness; and we are left without guidance by Mr. Dunlop. On the whole, it seems judicious to depend on Davies’ evidence only for the things that lay within his immediate and direct observation. His opinion on all that he himself saw is worthy of respect, and we may admit the sound legal maxim that a man’s evidence can always be accepted when it is given against himself.

The same distinction may surely be drawn in the case of Dr. Lynch. Davies was a man of English and Latin learning, Lynch a man of Irish and Latin learning. The historical criticism of their day was not perfect in either country, and as Davies leant to the English side of prejudice, Lynch leant to the Irish. But Lynch, like Davies, was I believe a just reporter of what he had himself seen or had heard from firsthand witnesses. And I have therefore quoted him, as I have Davies, for what had come within the range of his personal knowledge, not for matters of historical research. His testimony is of extraordinary and pathetic interest. Born in Galway in the last years of Elizabeth, when the city still preserved its old culture and the remnants of its old wealth, Lynch was one of the last scholars who ever saw and knew the Anglo-Irish civilisation. It is not any single picture that he gives that is important; it is the host of scattered and chance allusions, as to things well known to every Irishman in his day, which reveal to us the society in which he had been brought up. It is touching to remember that he was the last to say a good word for the medieval civilisation. After his death a darkness and silence of hundreds of years fell over that story, and it is across nearly three centuries that Irishmen will now have to take hands with Lynch and carry on his justification of the Ireland which was being gradually built up by the work of Gaels, Danes, Normans, and English in their common country.

This, however, is just what Mr. Dunlop denies. He “begs leave to doubt” that the “native Irish” in the fifteenth century developed the resources of the country. By omitting all contemporary references to timber, to leather, and to salmon, of course it can be said there was no medieval trade in these. The plan seems unsatisfactory, and I have not followed it. Mr. Dunlop, for example, blames me for not quoting an English poem (no pure moonshine here – perhaps a farthing dip) which does not mention leather, as proof that there was no leather trade. I have quoted the Libel elsewhere, but on this point I preferred the direct evidence of the records of the Bruges Staple; and I have since added notices in the Hansisches Urkundenbuch for leather sent in 1304, 1327, 1453 to Bruges, Dinant, and Portugal. I would ask which is the historical method: to close the question once for all with the negative silence of an anonymous English writer “whom we think,” says Mr. Dunlop, in one of his easy moods about evidence, “had a pretty accurate notion of what constituted Irish commerce”; or to pursue enquiry in business records of the ports and seek to ascertain the exact facts.

The art of making linen was known, according to Mr. Dunlop, to the “native Irish, as it is to most primitive races.” But what they made in Ireland was “of a very coarse kind, and its use was practically restricted to the wealthier class – viz., the merchants of the towns.” What is his proof for all this? Was it the town merchants that Campion describes wearing linen shirts for wantonness and bravery, “thirty yards are little enough for one of them”? What about the great linen rolls on the Irishwomen’s heads, and (is the inference too romantic?) perhaps on their bodies also? What about the fine linen in which the Galway women wrapped the Spanish hanged after the Armada? When I read of 6000 bales of linen cloth sent from Galway to Genoa in 1492, or of 4000 linen cloths mentioned in 1499 in another Galway merchant’s will, or of the “sardok” of mixed woollen and linen in the Netherland markets in 1353, or of Henry the Eighth forbidding Galway any more to export linen, the records of the time seem to conflict with the opinions which Mr. Dunlop “begs leave” to hold.

Mr. Dunlop now admits for the first time some trade in cloth, but with a stipulation of his own that it was all made by Englishmen. He does not trouble to consider such a clue as we find in the State Papers of Galway merchants carrying their wine into the country to exchange among other things for cloth. He has his own theory; “it is pretty clear from such expressions as Limerick cloak, Galway mantle, Waterford rug, that the centres of the cloth industry lay within the sphere of English influence”; the participation of the Irish was excluded by severe guild regulations, and “it may not be unfair to infer that the reputation acquired abroad by Ireland in regard to its serges was not due to the industry of its native population.” This insinuating hypothesis is a flaming fact on the next page, where it appears the “native Irish” (no inferring here to dull the conclusion) “took no part in the commercial development of their country, leaving it to the stranger within their gate, and thereby earning from the latter the reproach of idleness.” If there were, as Mr. Dunlop “prefers to think,” some loyal Irishmen who preferred English civilisation and the chances it offered them of pushing their way in life to their native customs, he states that the presence even of such loyal Irishmen “was not always welcome to citizens of English blood.” Thus the English of the towns must have toiled day and night to supply the mantles which the English Government forbade to loyal people, and to provide cloaks and cloth for the foreign trade, since in their incessant struggle to preserve themselves intact from Celtic influences they refused the aid of Irish hands to work for them. It is an idyllic picture of high purpose and endeavour, of the way to develop a country, and to make an empire.

We are not, however, shut up to this series of hypotheses. The town records themselves and English State Papers, as I have shown, give sufficient proof that the “native population” were not, in fact, rejected from the town industries. Mr. Dunlop denies this; he thinks the towns remained pure English. He is sure that all the Galway people shaved their upper lip weekly. Henry the Eighth was not so sure of it when, in 1536, he sent orders from Westminster to Galway men to shave themselves aright. When Mr. Dunlop, to prove that the Galway citizens consistently desired to keep themselves free from Irish customs, quotes laws against Irish games and keening, he quotes them without date. My contention is that, if it was necessary as late as 1527 and 1625 to enact these laws, this, with a number of other indications that I have mentioned, shows that the citizens’ “desire” was not very effective, and that there was an Irish population ready to push its way in trade, but not anxious to drop “their native customs.” No doubt the extent to which Irish names were changed must be conjectural; but there is evidence that such change did take place. My suggestion that “White” may indicate an Irish house gives Mr. Dunlop an opportunity to parade his knowledge of Gaelic. He informs me, on the authority of O’Donovan, that there is no such Gaelic name as Geal and imagines that settles the matter. He has never, then, heard of the name Fionn, which has been anglicised by “White” for centuries, just as a well-known Scotch writer of our day calls himself Henry White or Fionn indifferently.

As for intellectual culture, Mr. Dunlop is brevity itself. He has scarce a page for that chimera. The Irish were barbarous and the Anglo-Normans contaminated. His method is summary. The evidence of Mr. Whitley Stokes, of Dr. Norman Moore, of Mr. S. H. O’Grady, of Dr. Kuno Meyer has too little importance with him to be mentioned, and he can thus more easily avoid all proof of Irish scientific skill in medicine, or of the admirable quality of their translations from the Latin. He necessarily omits all mention of the many Irish scholars on the Continent, for has he not himself told us only one Irish chieftain made the perilous journey to Rome and back? He has no reference to buildings or arts which indicate the intercourse of Irish chiefs with the Continent. He is silent on the schools from which Irishmen were able to pass to foreign universities. He seems not to have heard of evidence of Latin culture collected by Mr. Justice Madden. And most wonderful to say, he seems entirely unaware of the importance of the list I have published, for the first time (by the generous kindness of a great scholar), of Irish translations of Continental works. Perhaps he felt himself anticipated by the conclusive comment I saw from a dashing newspaper critic, that “the Irish evidently satisfied themselves with translations!” In any case, he never hints at this list or its value as evidence. So astonishing a neglect of the greater matters of evidence, while every detail that could by any means discredit me is searched out, is surely a grave abuse of the historical method. In the matter of culture Mr. Dunlop confines himself with a singular restraint to a single topic – the list of Irishmen at Oxford. In this he counts many Anglo-Norman and only seventeen Gaelic names, and this solitary fact is enough to make him astonished that I “did not recognise how utterly untenable is her theory of the absorption of Anglo-Irish culture by the native Irish.” Those readers who will turn to the chapters on Irish learning in my book will perhaps be astonished not at the theory that there was culture in Ireland, but at the travesty of that theory and the suppression of evidence which serves as historical criticism for Mr. Dunlop.

Mr. Dunlop meets with a direct negative my statement that Sussex and Sidney carried off in their train every notable chief’s son they could lay hands on, but he gives no more than his own authority. My statement is perhaps too comprehensive, but I have given numerous instances (pp. 425-437) to show that the method certainly used by Sussex and Sidney, so far as they could, was steadily increased and extended in proportion as the English power gradually spread over one Irish region after another. The English took over the Irish system of hostages, but they developed it in a new way. The Catholic chief’s son was brought up in London as a Protestant, in English law and language and tradition, with the avowed purpose of spiritually severing him from his people, and leaving the clan without a natural leader or defender in the national conflict; their chiefs, in fact, were to be made the very instruments for dividing and subjugating their own people. In the words I quoted, it was a method which “not only rent asunder the bonds of national loyalty and of natural affection, but which forced parent and child alike to believe that in this world and in the world to come they were divided by an impassable abyss.” Surely there is no likeness in this deliberate plan to the Irish chief’s use of his hostage; it was, indeed, practised with consummate art by Turkey.

In this article Mr. Dunlop proposed to prove two facts: first, that Celtic civilisation is largely a figment of my imagination; and, secondly, that far from composing one nation, the English element in Ireland was proud of its origin, and struggled incessantly to preserve itself intact from Celtic influence. One part of his plan is destructive, and the second constructive. Unfortunately the work of destruction has proved so alluring that the constructive scheme is abandoned. As to the value of the destructive work, I contend that Mr. Dunlop’s criticisms are not so historically accurate, so reasonable, or so candid, that they can serve for correction or instruction. I contend further that even on the generous assumption that the whole of Mr. Dunlop’s criticisms might happen to be valid, there would still remain untouched the main body of my evidence and the whole current of my argument. And I confidently believe that the history of Ireland will be re-written on truer lines and surer foundations than those sketched out in the Cambridge Modern History and the Quarterly Review. But perhaps Mr. Dunlop will go farther. It would be pleasant to hear, in more detail, his views on “the Iberian element in the nation.”