ISBN 9781856357197


Brian Boru – King of Ireland
Roger Chatterton Newman
MERCIER PRESS
Cork

BRIAN BORU is a half-mythical figure, yet tangible evidence of him lies all around us. Kincora lies beneath Killaloe but nearby is the fortress of Béal Bóramha, partially excavated in 1961 by Professor Michael J. O’Kelly, who could date habitation by the discovery of two Hiberno-Norse silver pennies of 1035 and 1070. Near Macroom two leachtanna or memorial stones mark the place where Brian avenged his brother’s death. Between Tulla and Quin in Co. Clare, at Maigh Adhair, is the inauguration mound of the kings of Thomond. Five miles east of Athy is the ráth of Mullaghmast, scene of the bitter confrontation between the men of Thomond and the men of Desmond on the homeward march from Clontarf.
Brian lived in the heyday of the Viking age, when Ireland was part of the scattered empire that stretched across northern Europe. The Danes were strongly entrenched around the coast, in Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Wexford, and a Norse king reigned in Dublin, a Viking centre as important as York. Brian spent most of his life in continuous warfare against Danes and Norsemen, and finally broke their power at Clontarf. It was a pyrrhic victory, with three generations of his family perishing. But Brian was not only a great warrior; he was a cautious and careful planner and recognised the importance of dynastic alliances. One of his daughters was married to Sitric of Dublin (alas without the desired result) and another to Malcolm II of Scotland, a union from which Robert Bruce, Sigurd of Orkney, St Magnus, the thirteen claimants to the Scottish throne in 1291, and every Scottish and English sovereign, including Queen Elizabeth II, since the union of the two crowns in 1603, could trace their descent.

Preface
WHO was Brian Boru? What did he achieve and what was his contribution to Irish history? His name is as familiar to every Irish schoolchild as are the names of, say, Alfred the Great or William the Conqueror to an English schoolchild. Brian’s death at Clontarf on Good Friday, 1014, is an event as secure in history as the end of Harold at Hastings in 1066. Indeed, one might go further and say that Brian is known as the king who ‘drove the Danes out of Ireland’; but on that fiction, and on the fact of his death, his name rests. Harold, William and Alfred have had their biographers by the score, but it was not until 1914 – nine centuries after Clontarf – that a serious attempt was made to analyse Brian’s character and accomplishments. The writer who did so, T. J. Westropp in Brian Boru, The Hero of Clontarf – a slim volume of thirty-eight pages, first serialised in the Irish Monthly – was president of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland and an antiquarian of formidable stature. While much of his little book is made of the stuff of romance, he was the first writer to penetrate the screen of myth and legend that has separated us from Brian.
A more serious attempt to penetrate the myth was made by Mrs Alice Stopford Green in History of the Irish State to 1014, published in 1925. She was one of the first historians to recognise that Brian was not the usurping princeling from Thomond, not the revolutionary despot and certainly not the semi-mythical figure of various popular histories.
‘He was perhaps the greatest “realist” Ireland has known,’ she wrote, ‘at all times keeping pace with a changing world. His sense of realities taught him how far he could go and when to draw back. Warrior as he was by the hard training of his youth, where any peace was possible his one object was to avoid fighting. The true dignity of his character, and his single devotion to his country’s salvation, may be measured by the fact that in all the changing circumstances of his life we do not find a case in which personal humiliation or personal ambition was to him of any account …’
That he was entirely devoid of personal ambition, or that in one instance at least – as I attempt to show in chapter eight – personal humiliation had no effect on him, is doubtful, and perhaps rightly so, for we are searching for a man, not a figure from the pages of chivalry and romance as epitomised by Sir Thomas Mallory’s King Arthur. But Mrs Stopford Green, herself devoted to the cause of Irish freedom, was generally correct in her analysis, although it was confined to a bare three chapters of her book. An earlier historian, the Hon. Emily Lawless, writing The Story of the Nations: Ireland (London, 1887), has called Brian an ‘unmistakable king’, but like most writers of her time devoted even less space to him than Mrs Stopford Green or Westropp were to do.
But Alice Stopford Green and T. J. Westropp set the precedent, and they were followed in 1938 by the Revd John Ryan, SJ, in his long and invaluable essay on the battle of Clontarf in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, and in 1967 with his contribution to North Munster Studies – ‘Brian Boruma, King of Ireland’. Both essays are referred to frequently throughout this book. The fact remains, however, that to many people Brian Boru is seen, as Emily Lawless admitted, as a ‘sort of giant Cormoran, or Eat-’em-alive-oh!, a being out of a fairy tale, whom nobody is expected to take seriously; nay, as a symbol for ridiculous and inflated pretension …’ I hope that in the following pages this impression is finally dispelled.
It is true that even in his lifetime Brian was regarded by the longer established royal houses of Ireland as a pretentious usurper from an obscure clan in the south-west of the country. The youngest son of the king of Thomond – a throne in all probability elevated by the most aristocratic family in the island, the Uí Néill, to help maintain their own authority – he was certainly not born to greatness. His leadership of a small band of guerillas, holding out in the wilds of Clare against the Danes of Limerick, brought him to prominence with his own people; the murder of his eldest surviving brother, Mathghamhain, gave him the thrones of Thomond and Munster. Having come thus far, he went on to displace the mighty Uí Néill on the high throne of Ireland, and in old age established a form of governance that was probably the nearest to a strong central monarchy the conglomeration of disunited Irish kingdoms had ever experienced. He subdued the Scandinavian inhabitants of the island and, having done so, turned their skills in commerce to the benefit of native and Land Leaper alike.
Brian was called Emperor of the Gael by a scribe at Armagh; and although the accolade was accorded him in his presence, and by a lifelong friend and counsellor, he was perhaps the only ruler in Irish history (and certainly the only one in the two or three centuries preceding English domination) who came anywhere near to deserving such a title. He never achieved absolute hegemony over the entire island – the Uí Néill at their most influential failed in this – and his reign was not the period of uninterrupted peace that some writers would have us believe. But his authority was felt in four of the five major kingdoms and, by the time he was crowned high king in 1002, he held undisputed sway in the south and east and within the Norse city-state of Dublin. Brian’s policies and reforms, unusual when compared with the average politics of his age, were based on a genuine desire to bring peace and prosperity to his realm. He succeeded to a degree; had he been younger he may have achieved far more. Yet, had he not achieved as much as he did, would his name be so familiar today – although it might be said that his death brought him most of his enduring fame?
It is unfortunate that so little reliable source material is available for a student of Brian’s life and work. The various annals, in untranslated form, and notably the composition known popularly as the Four Masters, are prone to wild exaggeration and eulogistic fancy where particular heroes or villains are concerned. Later amendments and additions, as well as some poor translation or editing in the nineteenth century, have further complicated the picture. It should also be borne in mind that many sources were compiled centuries after the events they so vividly describe took place.
Yet, by sifting the probable from the nonsensical, likely fact from undoubted myth, it is possible to gain a considerable impression of the years leading up to Brian’s birth and then of the seventy-three years of his own existence. I have referred to the more reliable historians and, I hope, have in some degree succeeded in following their footsteps through the devious maze created by the old annalists. A full biblio-graphy will be found in the notes at the end of the book.
An explanation should be given of the form of spelling of the names of people and places throughout these pages. Place names still in existence are also given in the English form, to aid identification by the reader; battles fought before or during Brian’s lifetime appear in Irish, for as such they would have been known to the combatants, together with the present-day locations. The names of most people must obviously appear in Irish, the most notable exception being Brian Boru himself. It might be thought that if I was to be consistent in style, he should appear as Brian Bórumha; but Boru, the anglicised form, is in common usage and has been for centuries. I feel that no excuse is needed for calling a national hero by the name usually associated with him. Another exception is the use of the term, Ardrí, or high king. According to Professor Etienne Rynne, in his editing of North Munster Studies, the correct term is Rí Éireann, King of Ireland, Ardrí not being found in the annals before the coming of the Anglo-Normans. Once again, however, I have decided to use the term that is more generally known. During the seven years that this work was in preparation, I received invaluable encouragement and aid from many quarters. My deepest debt of gratitude is to the late Dan Nolan, of Anvil Books, Dublin. No mean authority on Irish history, he not only provided me with important sources for reference – and constantly revived my enthusiasm for the task in hand – but he published the result. It is as much his book as mine.
I am greatly in the debt of Dr Pádraig de Brún, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies for his help and kindness. The late Professor Michael J. O’Kelly, late head of the Department of Archaeology, University College Cork, placed at my disposal his valuable collection of photographs taken during the excavation of Béal Bóramha, Co. Clare, carried out under his direction in 1961, and I am most grateful for his generosity. I must also record my gratitude to his department for bringing to my attention the late Professor Seán P. Ó Ríordáin’s report of the excavations at Garranes (Ráth Raithleann), Co. Cork, carried out in the 1930s. And my thanks are due also to the Very Revd Henry Lillie, MA; to Monsignor Bernard Kenney; Mrs Mette Sunnana and Mr Torbjørn Støverud; Mr Fleming Andre Larsen; Fr Bartholomew Egan, OFM; Fr L. C. Coffey, OP; and the patient and know•ledgeable staff of the London Library. Miss Nessa O’Connor, Mr Joseph P. Murray, Mr Raghnall Ó Floinn, Mr Patrick F. Wallace, National Museum of Ireland; and Mr Martin Ryan of the National Library, were extremely helpful and courteous; as was Mr Laurence Walsh, Limerick City Museum; Mrs Brighid Dolan, librarian at the Royal Irish Academy; and Mrs Mary Ireland and Mr C. N. Sheehan at the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland.
I must thank Bord Fáilte and the Commissioners of Public Works for permission to use photographs and for providing prints; and in this respect am also most grateful to Miss Betty Wilson and Mr Gareth Hawe of Armagh.
My thanks, too, to the team at Mercier Press, for reinvigorating Brian Boru.

1: The Land Leapers
THE last decade of the eighth century was a dark period for Ireland. Across the waves of the Irish Sea had come the long black ships of Scandinavian freebooters: those Norsemen, Pagans, Galls, call them what you will,1 they descended upon the unprotected shores of Ireland, ‘merciless, soure and hardie, from their very cradles dissentious’, as the Annals of the Four Masters record. Their first appearance in the waters hitherto protecting these islands had been in 787 when, according to the British chronicler, William of Malmesbury, Danish pirates had landed on English shores to ‘ascertain the fruitfullness of its soil and to try the courage of the inhabitants’. And although Ireland had suffered no major assault at that date, Irishmen were well aware of the ravages of these ‘soure and hardie’ strangers.
For the next five or six years the coasts of Northumbria had been regularly visited, and the bands of Irish missionaries who had systematically left their native land to promulgate the faith among the Saxon kingdoms would have had dire misgivings for the welfare of those they had left behind.2 Their fears were realised with a vengeance in 795 when, after attacking and burning the religious settlement on the tiny island of Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumbria in north-east England, where, a century before, the Irish saint Aodhan had established a community, the Norsemen crossed to Ire-land, laying waste the island now known as Lambay, north of the bay later named after the Norse town of Dublin.

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