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From: "Gerry Moloney" <>
Subject: [IRL-CARLOW] Saint Malachy
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2006 09:25:32 -0000
In-Reply-To: <004c01c722ef$e4ad76d0$0a02a8c0@homeoffice>


Jim,
Mentioning St. Malachy as you do below, did you know:

1. Aoife was responsible for bringing the bones of St. Malachy back from France (where he died) to Ireland.
2. St Malachy made many prophesies about Ireland including:

a.
Ireland will by under English rule for a 'week of centuries' but then, in here turn, will play a great part in bringing England back to the faith.
b.
The Anti-Christ will never set foot in Ireland because, at that time, it will be inundated with water.

Don't know how accurate these are but I have read or heard them at some point. I'm sure they are on the web somewhere.

Believe them or believe them not.

Gerry



'You can lead a man to knowledge but you can't make him think.'
Gerry Moloney (Lecturer)
Computing Dept., ITCarlow, Ireland.
Office: (059)9170455
Mobile: (087)9184000


-----Original Message-----
From: [mailto:] On Behalf Of Jim Roache
Sent: 18 December 2006 22:00
To:
Subject: [IRL-CARLOW] Hard to argue with this - the man knows his stuff andworks from the Book of Kells. (LONG)

http://www.gwp.enta.net/home.htm
http://www.gwp.enta.net/irishhist.htm

OK, I'll fess up - I was having a little fun before - I felt there were trolls here and they were taking over what had been a grand list.

I feigned outrage to make a point. I'm really like an old dog, quiet, just don't step on my tail.

I think the list master caught on right away. Some people call these sites (referenced above) "bucket shops" and most dealing in heraldry are. But popularizing maps and history from accepted sources is an exception to the rule.

Most will (I think) like what he says below - part of the booklet for which a URL is provided above.
"ÉIRE SNA MEÁNAOISEANNA (IRELAND IN THE MIDDLE AGES) represents an attempt, using medieval records and later historical research, to map in detail the place-names and the family names of Ireland in their contemporary (usually Irish) form at about AD 1300, the earliest practicable date.

Why 1300? At first glance a better date would appear to be 1169 - the year before the Anglo-Norman invasion led by the Earl of Pembroke, known to history as Strongbow. In 1169 Ireland was independent, with a rich Celtic culture dating back some 1500 years. A thousand years earlier, every other Celtic country had fallen to Rome, but in the British Isles the Roman Empire had expanded no further west than Wales (although the Romans traded with the Irish, whom they called Scots).

The Romans' successors as invaders of England, the Angles and Saxons, were stopped at the English-Welsh border. Indeed Ireland, although never united, for much of the first millennium AD was effectively an expansionist power; kings such a Niall of the Nine Hostages raided England and Wales (St Patrick first came to Ireland as a captured slave) and colonized western Scotland (see the entry for Carrigfergus). To the latter country they gave not only their language, but their own name, for it became known as Scotia Minor and ultimately Scotland.

Only the Vikings, fierce seafarers from Norway, made permanent inroads in Ireland. They came in the centuries after AD 795, founding fortified trading colonies at Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Wexford. But whilst they penetrated deep into the country via rivers such as the Shannon, and wrought great havoc from time to time with raids on monasteries, showing a brutality which was copied by some Irish kings - the blinding of defeated enemies, for example - they never achieved an overall conquest of Ireland as their Danish cousins did of England under King Canute.

Indeed it was in 1014, just two years before Canute became king of England, that the Irish, temporarily united under their high-king, Briain Boroimhe (Brian Boru), inflicted a defeat on the Vikings at Clontarf. Although Brian, an old man by this time, was killed in his camp by fleeing Vikings, and his son Murchad, who led the army, died in the battle, his victory ensured that never again would the Vikings seek to move out of their strongholds.

In 1066, England, having reverted to an Anglo-Saxon king, Harold, was conquered again by the Normans (Vikings who had settled in northern France about AD 900) under William the Conqueror. Norman barons soon expanded into parts of Wales, whilst those remaining in Normandy pushed south by land into France and by sea to Sicily and the Holy Land, where they elevated themselves to kingship. Other Vikings had already colonized Iceland and Greenland, reached North America, and penetrated deep into Russia, trading down the Danube with the capital of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople. In 1154 William's great-grandson, King Henry II, ascended the English throne. As he also inherited Normandy and vast possessions in France, where he spent much of his 35 year reign, he became the most powerful ruler in Western Europe.

In 1169 Ireland was still independent. True, it was divided into five sub-kingdoms, Connacht, Leinster, Meath, Munster and Ulster (the latter then very much fragmented), with the Vikings retaining their coastal towns, and was the scene, as usual, of fierce struggles between rival kings and sub-kings (the Celts had always been a tribal people and after Brian Boru all high-kings ruled `with opposition'), but it was independent. In a Norman-dominated Europe, however, it was in a sense living on borrowed time. In England and, particularly, south Wales, Henry's restless and ambitious barons were casting covetous eyes at the rich country just a day's sailing to their west. All they needed was an excuse to invade.

In 1139 the bishop of Armagh, Máel Sechnaill (St Malachy) had brought to the Pope's notice the parlous state of the Irish church. It was dominated and exploited by local rulers, and discipline in monasteries had broken down - hereditary lay-abbots, or co- arbs, farmed the revenues, and many monks lived openly with their mistresses and families. St Malachy founded a new strict Cistercian abbey at Mellifont, and it was here in 1152, four years after his death, that the Synod of Kells was convened. Many reforms were introduced and four bishops were invested as archbishops, Armagh now having direct access to Rome.

In England, however, Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, resented this development for in AD 601 the Pope had given his predecessor, St Augustine, nominal authority over all the Celtic churches. The archbishop's secretary, John of Salisbury, went to Rome to see his close friend Pope Adrian IV, the only Englishman ever to hold the office, and in 1156 the Pope issued a Papal bull, or decree, ordering Henry to Ireland, `to subject the people to the laws and root out the weeds of vice'. Furthermore he granted Ireland to Henry to hold by `hereditary right', despite the fact that no English king [Henry was King of England, but he was NOT English - he was Norman - JFR] had ever been there.

The justification for this action lay in a document, known as the Donation of Constantine, which purported to show that the Emperor Constantine had in about AD 320 given `Italy and the Western Region' to the Pope. The document is now known to be an 8th-century forgery and in any event Ireland had never been part of the Roman Empire. Henry accepted `Adrian's Donation', but, much occupied with affairs in France, made no immediate plans for invasion. Eleven years later events were to force his hand.

In 1051 King Diarmait MacMurchada (Murphy) of Leinster had abducted Derbforgaill, wife of King Tigern, Ruairc (O'Rourke) of Breifne (the northern parts of modern Leitrim and Cavan. Although she was restored to Tigern the next year, the insult was never forgiven and in 1166 O'Rourke allied himself with the new high-king, Toirrdelbach, Conchobhair (O'Connor), and drove Diarmait out of his kingdom.

Diarmait, taking his daughter A¡Aoife (Eve) with him, sailed to Bristol and thence to France to seek aid from Henry. The king responded with a general letter to his liegemen authorizing any who wished to ally themselves with Diarmait to do so. The baron who took up the challenge, and A¡fe's hand in marriage, was a Norman whose grandfather Gerald had married a Welsh princess: he was Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, known as Strongbow (thus Cambro-Norman - JFR).

In 1169, his uncle, Maurice Fitzgerald, helped Diarmait capture Wexford, and in August 1170 Strongbow himself arrived.

`It was,' lamented the writer of The Annals of Ulster, `the beginning of the woes of Ireland'.

Strongbow and his fellow adventurers, using the advanced Norman military techniques which had brought victory throughout Europe, conquered Leinster and part of Meath, and took Waterford and Dublin (with Irish help - JFR).

Henry became aware that he was in danger of finding an independent Norman kingdom to the west of him. (He wasn't worried about the Irish, but the Cambro Normans - JFR). At the same time the recent murder of Archbishop Thomas . Becket in Canterbury Cathedral by four English (nope - Norman - JFR) knights, meant that he was anxious to improve relations with the Papacy.

For both these reasons, in October 1171, he sailed with 400 ships to Ireland. Strongbow and his companions submitted to him; so did all the Irish kings, except those in the distant north west, hoping that his arrival would curb the land-hunger of his barons.

A threatened rebellion elsewhere forced Henry, now styled `Lord of Ireland', to leave after a few months, never to return. The next royal visitor, in 1185, was his son Prince John, later King John, then aged seventeen. John's arrogance - among other insults he allowed his companions to pull the beards of some chieftains who had come to pay him homage - became notorious and set the tone for his disastrous relationship with the Irish.

Ireland as a whole was never conquered. John's successors seldom, if ever, visited the country and no strong Anglo-Norman central authority was established as it had been in England. The earliest Anglo-Norman (Cambro-Norman - JFR) settlers displaced many existing Irish sub-kings, but Irish `septs' had always been mobile and the sub-kings simply settled in less favourable land rather than submit to the invaders. (A sept was a group of people in the same locality using the same surname; the more formal clan system never developed in Ireland as it did in Scotland.)

Many Anglo-Norman (Cambro-Norman, Flemish and other allied - JFR) families became `hibernized' through intermarriage and fostering with the Irish nobility, and local custom soon taught them to think of themselves in the same terms. Indeed, the chronicler Gerald of Wales complained that they were `more Irish than the Irish'. Edward MacLysacht, commented, few now would deny the essential Irishness of families such as the Burkes, the Dillons or the Fitzgeralds; these Anglo-Irish (nope - Cambro-Irish - descendants of Welsh Princess Nesta and her various partners - JFR) names can be found on the map.

The 13th century saw innumerable local conflicts between Irish, Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Norman families throughout the island, and after 1258 the introduction of heavily-armed Scottish mercenaries or galloglasses into Ireland by the Irish eliminated Norman superiority in battle. (In fact my maternal family were brought on as gallowglass from Scotland - McCauley - in the NW - JFR).

The various justiciars sent by the king from England failed to stamp their authority on Ireland, whilst excessive financial demands by Edward I to support his wars in Wales and Scotland impoverished the country. The very diversity of the Irish made their total defeat impossible, but at the same time deprived them of victory over the government in Dublin.

Their best chance came in 1316 when the Edward Bruce, brother of King Robert the Bruce of Scotland, victor over the English at Bannockburn, was invited by the king of Ulster to become high-king. After a year of victories and a coronation in Ulster, however, his triumphal progress around Ireland the next year coincided with a disastrous famine, and the rapaciousness of his Scottish troops totally alienated the Irish. He was killed in battle the next year.

Although the 14th century saw a considerable revival of Gaelic power and tradition, it also saw legislation, culminating in 1366 in The Statutes of Kilkenny, which was designed to bolster the legal and linguistic position of the insecure English minority, and condemned the native Irish, referred to as `the Irish enemies', and the Anglo-Irish [Cambro and Norman Irish], termed `the degenerate English', to be second-class citizens in their own country.

[And that's what I thought I was - degenerate Cambro-Norman or Irish (Hibernicized). Yes for a time some tried to be loyal to the King and the Pope - but that was impossible after Henry VIII!!! and Elizabeth! How many of our name died attempting to free Ireland - even though some were on the other side and some went back and forth. At the end of the day, my family was in the Battle at New Ross and some of our heads mounted on or near the Three Bullet Gate afterwards. Then to be told I was a foreigner, an invader and worst of all Anglo --- well that did it. The fact that Roche Arms, titles and holding in Wexford were rendered Dormant and Abeyant - after they told the Kin's Herald to "bugger off" is well documented - JFR}

WHY MAP AT IRELAND AS AT 1300? The overriding practical reason for choosing 1300 as a date for this map is that more information is available about place-names and especially family names at 1300 than at 1169. The map can be much more comprehensive. The turbulent century following Strongbow's invasion saw an unprecedented building programme of stone castles and monasteries and these still dominate the landscape in many areas. A map showing these places is very much easier to relate to modern Ireland. Similarly, although the Irish started using surnames centuries earlier than most other Europeans, many Irish surnames only came into existence after 1200.

SUB-KINGDOMS AND COUNTIES: By 1300 the Anglo-Normans [Cambro-Normans] had created many of the counties familiar today, but the Irish still thought in terms of the ancient sub-kingdoms and it is these that are emphasized on the map. (Boundaries between sub-kingdoms changed greatly over the centuries and at this period did not correspond exactly to those of today; in particular Meath is now part of Leinster). Contemporary county and liberty boundaries (where known) are also shown, liberties being similar to counties, except that in them the king delegated most of his powers to a local magnate.

In 1300, only Meath and most of Leinster (the Wicklow mountains remained unsubdued for many years), an area which became known as The Pale, was under direct royal rule. The Pale was to shrink dramatically in the next century. This, then, is a map of Ireland 700 years ago, but is also one which, through its place-names and family names allows the viewer to glance much farther back into Ireland's unique history - back to the period of the Dark Ages when Celtic bards and Celtic monasteries kept a beacon of learning and Christianity burning in a small corner of war-torn and pagan northern Europe

THE BOOK OF KELLS AND BRIAN BORU'S HARP

The decorations on the map are based on The Book of Kells. The supreme example of Celtic illuminated manuscripts and one of the great treasures of Europe, this was probably begun in the late 8th century in the monastery of Iona in Scotland, which had been founded by St Columba in AD 563, and removed from there to Kells in Meath for safety after a Viking raid. It may have been completed in the early 9th century. It can now be viewed in the magnificent library of Trinity College, Dublin. The harp above the cartouche is known as Brian Boru's Harp, although it was undoubtedly made after his time, possibly about the date of this map; much restored, it is also held at Trinity College.

Note: Readers should note that the miles shown on the map are medieval Irish miles, which were about 6,700 ft compared to the modern statute mile of 5,280 ft. Leagues, a Norman introduction to the British, varied considerably, but were between 2 and 3 Irish miles."

I hope this clarifies the earlier exchange...

Jim

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