Now: when I’m making a story, there’s one thing I have to do, or it won’t come out right. I have to open wide the eyes of my mind and let my imagination do the work. So as I sit here in this decent house, full of decent people, I close the eyes in my head, and I open the eyes in my mind, and what do I see?
I see the sun shining and the birds in the trees singing their small sweet songs. Next, I see the shimmering waves beating and retreating along the empty shore. And now I find myself standing there, all those centuries ago, and I look out to sea.
What do I behold? I see dots on the horizon—and they’re coming nearer and clearer. What are they? They’re sails; I look harder, and the sails draw nearer. Unlike the ship bringing Iseult to her dying Tristan, these sails are neither black nor white—they are red, red as blood, and beneath them sit rows of men with great oars whose efforts scatter little white waves across the surface of the water.
But what else do I see? Along the sands, ranks and ranks of soldiers already wait, camped by moored ships, and waddling to and fro among them I see a man with a big stomach, his armor bulging out against it. One hand is resting on his sword’s hilt, and the other hand’s shading his eyes from the sun. I assume this man to be Raymond le Gros; he certainly looks fat enough for such a nickname.
I follow the direction of his gaze, and next I see, from my place in the low sand dunes, that the ships, and there are many of them, are now coming gently into the shallow waters. Soldiers jump out and wade ashore, and last of all comes a tall man to whom everyone defers. He is clearly a chief among chieftains—he is Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, the man they called “Strongbow.”
Strongbow was once the earl of Pembroke, but for political reasons he had been stripped of his title by the king of England, Henry the Second. Since no man likes being humiliated, the baron was pleased enough to come to Ireland, where he might make a fresh start. Dermot MacMurrough had approached him, because he himself had been deposed as king of Leinster. He said to Strongbow, “You put me back on the Leinster throne, and I’ll make you my successor.”
“Fair enough,” said Strongbow, and over he sailed.
Dermot made another promise too, but I’ll come to that in a moment.
Not many people wanted Dermot back in Ireland. He was a well-respected soldier, but he was a terrible man. After a battle one day, he saw the head of an enemy lying on a pile of severed heads, and he said to one of his soldiers, “Bring that over here to me.”
With a curl of distaste on his lips, the soldier obeyed the order. Dermot reached out, took the head by the hair, held it up, and turned it this way and that.
“D’you know what?” he said. “I hated this fellow when he was alive.”
So, with everybody watching, he took a big bite out of the cheek on the dead man’s face. Dermot MacMurrough was not a man you’d lightly invite to your home.
Right: Strongbow has landed, and everything is set up and waiting for him. On that fair August day, the army of Strongbow and Raymond le Gros set out from Baginbun and marched due west through the rich fields to Waterford, where the citizens barricaded themselves in. Strongbow’s archers breached the walls, Waterford fell, and the Normans tore in and killed a great many people. The blood, it is said, ran like streams down the streets of the city.
Dermot arrived with reinforcements—and more than that. He brought with him the other half of his promise to Strongbow—his own beautiful daughter. Her name was Aoife, and she was Dermot’s declared heiress—she would one day inherit a great parcel of land. Strongbow was a widower and the shrewd Dermot had promised him Aoife’s hand in marriage.
See how this suited the parties? Strongbow would get a wife who owned land. Dermot would get a son-in-law with a strong army. And Aoife, if anybody considered her, would get a powerful husband to protect her and maybe give her children.
Such marriages of convenience were not unusual or surprising in those times—indeed, they happen to this very day. It never happened to me, but what woman would have a nomad like myself? And anyway, I believe you can’t organize and control the random passions of the heart.
Except—sometimes in marriages of convenience great love is born. It happened to Aoife, who in the midst of all this planning and arranging took everybody by surprise with her reaction. After one look at Strongbow, this fine Frenchman in his shining armor and his chain mail and his great bow made of the wood of the yew tree and his dark eyebrows that met in the middle of his forehead and his rich French accent, she fell in love with him. He thought her the prettiest girl he had ever seen. There and then, on Tuesday, the twenty-fifth of August, in the year eleven-seventy, they were married in Reginald’s Tower, which you can see to this very day standing, big and round and proud, on the quays of Waterford.
There was the blood of the city swirling around their ankles, there were men moaning and groaning from their wounds, there were other men trying to pluck the arrows from the breasts of the fallen—the French are very thrifty, they always use something more than once if they can—and there were distraught women weeping and mourning and beating their breasts in anguish because their husbands and brothers and sons and sweethearts had been killed in the defense of their native city. Nevertheless, that is where and when the great wedding took place, while the clouds sailed the sky and the ships sailed the seas.
The Storyteller stopped speaking, but the tape continued to hiss. Ronan and Kate could hear sucking noises, and they grinned at each other.
“My pipe’s gone out, and I forgot to get matches. Is there a man here with a light? Ah! Decent man, I thank you, sir, I’ll make sure you get them back.”
They heard the scrape of a match; a short pause, more sucking and puffing, then a deep breath.
NOW, THIS IS A GOOD MOMENT TO TELL YOU something you’ll all recognize. The Normans, as we all know, were here to stay. And they never left. I’m sure there are Normans among you in this room tonight. How would you know? Well—listen carefully.
What’s in a name? You’re descended from a Norman or from a family who came in with them if your name is one of these: Prendergast, Cogan, Fitzgerald, Barrett, Lacy, Cullen, Bermingham, Devereaux, Condon, Walsh, Power, Bolger, Eustace, Barry, Tyrrell, Keating, Codd, Neville, Roche, Cummins, Furlong, Colfer, Stafford, Carew, Hayes—and there’s a lot more that I haven’t mentioned.
I think I gave you twenty-five names there, and you should think about some of them. Down around Wexford you can’t throw a stone without hitting a Devereaux or a Bolger or a Colfer or a Codd or a Stafford or a Roche or a Furlong. Next door in county Waterford, there are as many Walshes and Powers as there are leaves on a tree.
The line of history is very short. From eleven-seventy to say, next year, nineteen-sixty, that’s a stretch of only seven hundred and ninety years, no more than forty generations, if we call a generation twenty years. We all know people who went to Parnell’s funeral in Dublin in eighteen-ninety-one, our lost leader, God be good to him. My father was there, and, he said, so were a million other people.
And in nineteen-thirty, when I myself was forty-two years old, I met two old men up in the west whose grandfathers saw the French under General Humbert land at Killala in seventeen-ninety-eight, their blue uniforms shining as they came up from the beach on the twenty-second of August—a Wednesday, I believe. How is it that all Irish invasions seem to happen in August? I wonder, could it be anything to do with the weather?
All I’m saying is that if people with the names I’m telling you here tonight came over with Strongbow and his barons, and people with the same names still live in the countryside where he landed and ran his first campaigns—that is not coincidence. They are direct descendants of the Normans.
Now—Waterford has fallen, and so has Wexford, which is once again in the hands of Dermot MacMurrough and the knights who helped him. Strongbow and his bride, Aoife, seem as loving a couple as ever tied a knot.
The next target was obvious—the biggest Viking city in Ireland, Dublin. By the tim
e he left Waterford, Strongbow must have had five thousand men with him—and up in front, beside himself and Aoife, rode her father, Dermot MacMurrough, and the stout man, Raymond the Fat. Five thousand men is a big gathering at any time in any place. In Ireland in eleven-seventy, where the population was still fairly sparse, you’d think you couldn’t keep an army like that a secret. Well, they did.
To begin with, the Normans weren’t like Irish soldiers, who were a bit ragged, to say the least. No, these foreign men were armed and disciplined; they didn’t slouch along, they marched. The cavalrymen rode big horses, they carried lances, and they had heavy armor because they were easy targets. And alongside them trotted the elite—the archers of France, deadly with their yew longbows and their arrows. Behind came the provisions, wagons of food and drink, and the civilians in charge of them.
Not many in Ireland would ever have seen a crowd that large. The people in the counties along the southeastern side—Waterford and Wexford, Kilkenny and Carlow and Wicklow and Kildare—they came out to watch these fine marching soldiers and all their equipment. Women stood at doorways, wondering who they were. Children either hid from them or ran after them, marching in step, as children like to do. Men in the fields put down their spades and watched the soldiers in no small amount of fear.
Other people heard they were passing through and traveled many miles across the country to view them from a hilltop or watch as they forded a river, their armor glinting in the sun, the wheels of their carts trundling in the ruts of the mud. This, you’d have thought, was no surprise attack. You may be sure that the word got out—there’s an army marching north, and they must be heading for Dublin.
And in case it didn’t, horsemen saddled up and rode ahead of this army, looking back over their shoulders. Their intention was to ride forward and warn the city, hoping to be paid for bringing such bad news; never a good idea—people often shoot the messenger.
But then something very surprising happened—Strongbow and his army disappeared. They had been marching through Kilkenny and Carlow, and there was wide, open country between them and Dublin—but they vanished. Disappeared. Not to be seen. Was there a door in a mountain? Did they fall down a hole?
This is what happened. Being a shrewd general, Strongbow wanted as much advantage of surprise as he could get, so he had Dermot MacMurrough’s guides—local men—lead them on a secret route through the passes of the Wicklow mountains. The weather must have been very fine, because even today you’d never get an army of five thousand men through Glendalough if the weather wasn’t good. But in they went, into the forests and through the ravines, and nobody saw them for days. Dublin heard they’d gone away, and everybody breathed again.
But it’s no more than thirty miles from the foothills of Wicklow to the outskirts of Dublin, and Strongbow was at the walls before they knew it. The citizens rushed to defend. They raised extra fences of wattle; huge spars locked the gates; they chopped down trees and tried to barricade the river Liffey. No good. All in vain.
Now I open my mind’s eye again, and I see myself standing outside the old walls of Dublin, if we can call them walls. It was early on a September morning, when the light in Ireland is as lovely as in heaven. For a long time nothing happened. A dog barked; a child peered out from behind a fence to look at the Norman knights in their wonderful silvery armor and their thousands of men, ranked up neatly on a sward of green grass. The main gate opened a little, and out slipped a respectable gentleman, who walked briskly toward where Strongbow sat on his horse.
This was the archbishop of Dublin, Laurence O’Toole. He saw the great man at the head of this impressive troop, and then his eyes went to the figure riding alongside Strongbow.
“My God in heaven,” he said to himself. “Dermot MacMurrough is back!”
He hesitated for a moment, then walked on.
“Is there any justice in the world?” said the archbishop, still talking to himself. “That barbarian!”
It was at that moment the bad name of Dermot MacMurrough was forever set, the reputation that branded him Ireland’s greatest traitor. Laurence O’Toole surmised that Dermot went off to get help and didn’t care what happened to whom.
As befits the conventions of war, Strongbow greeted the archbishop with a courteous salute, even though he didn’t understand a word the man said; Strongbow spoke a combination of English, French, and the old Celtic language, Welsh.
Dermot translated the archbishop’s words. The people of Dublin wanted no trouble. Of any kind. It was well over a hundred years since the battle of Clontarf. In the meantime Dublin had been settling down nicely. We all get on well here, Irish and Viking. And Archbishop O’Toole wanted to know, Was there anything they could do for this strange, strong band of men?
Dermot put it plainly. He was coming back to claim his Leinster throne; Dublin was his capital. Whatever man was now calling himself the king of Leinster should step down immediately, and there’d be no bloodshed. The knight in armor beside him was no less a figure than the personal emissary of King Henry of England.
The archbishop gritted his teeth and said to Strongbow, “What terms would you want in return for not attacking Dublin?”
Strongbow said, “Complete surrender.”
The archbishop said, “Out of the question,” and he turned to go back inside the city, where he’d tell everybody what a traitor Dermot MacMurrough was.
The moment he walked away, Strongbow’s two leading officers, Raymond le Gros and Milo de Cogan, who was a very clever general, gave the order to storm the city. Dublin fell that morning, and Milo de Cogan opened the gates for Strongbow and Aoife to ride in triumphantly. There was a king there, Hasculf, a Viking; some say he was an ancestor of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who, like Hasculf, was a man from Orkney. Anyway, Hasculf fled to those northern isles he came from, and we’ll return to his part in the story in a moment.
Meanwhile, Strongbow and his Normans took over Dublin and got to work. They did what all conquerors do—they got a tight grip on the people they conquered, and they set up for themselves the best of everything; fine food and drink, the nicest clothes, comfortable beds.
So began in earnest the Norman conquest of Ireland. When the city was under control, and Dermot had been restored to the throne, and daily life was back to normal, they set out to take over the surrounding counties. Their ventures took in a circle from Louth in the north all around to Meath and Kildare to the west and Wicklow in the south. And of course the sea gave them an eastern defense.
They were organized and careful; they were tough; they had come to get land, and they meant to get that land. Day in, day out, they did more and more to dig in. They built stone castles and strong bridges, they extracted vows of loyalty and taxes from the Irish chieftains, and they began to construct the boundary known as the Pale. That was the fence to keep out the native Irish—so if anything is said to be “beyond the Pale,” it’s wild and uncontrollable.
In eleven-seventy-one, a year after the fall of Dublin, Dermot MacMurrough died. They said he had a horrible death—that his flesh began to melt off his bones, and he died screaming. When this news went abroad, Hasculf the Viking came back from his northern climes to besiege Dublin, and he brought with him a terrible weapon.
You are familiar, no doubt, with the word berserk? Haven’t you often heard that a man “went berserk”? The word refers, as we know it, to a state of mind producing awful behavior. But it comes from a Scandinavian word, in Norse, meaning first of all a man who wore a coat or a shirt made from a bear’s skin, and secondly, a certain kind of fighter. Presumably a man who could kill a bear and take his coat and wear it wasn’t a lily. Some Norse kings used to wheel cages of these Berserks onto battlefields, and when things got bad, they opened the cages and let them out.
That’s what happened in Dublin. Hasculf brought Berserks with him, and the Normans were nonplussed by these crazy warriors, especially by a big, wild man called John the Mad. He was the greatest fighter Hasculf could find;
he carried a huge axe, which he swung in circles around his head, and God help anyone who came within range of it.
And he had one special trick. Remember—Norman cavalrymen wore armor and chain mail. But John the Mad would aim his axe at a cavalryman’s thigh, cut through the armor, and sever the limb so that the Norman’s leg fell down on one side of his horse, and he himself fell down the other side—where John the Mad immediately cut off his head. John was what you’d call a definite sort of fellow.
The battle for Dublin between Hasculf and his Berserks and Strongbow and his generals was probably the fiercest and most prolonged battle ever fought on the island of Ireland. Once the Vikings got back in, they linked up with the local people, who hated Strongbow. The native Dubliners showed Hasculf’s soldiers all the lanes and alleyways, and from these they would jump out and attack the Normans. Soon the entire Viking army was within the walls and rampaging through the streets. They took their cue from John the Mad, whom they could see up ahead, hacking men down left and right.
Strongbow’s generals had to do something; this is what they did. That clever man Milo de Cogan led his troops out through one of the city gates, giving the impression that he and his soldiers were in retreat. But they weren’t; he rode back in by another gate, came up on the Viking rear, and cut the tail off the dragon.
That was the end of it. Three Norman knights killed John the Mad. It was like cutting down an oak—they hacked and hacked with their swords, and John the Mad’s blood spurted, they said, high as the leaves on the trees. Raymond le Gros captured Hasculf and marched him to Strongbow, who listened for a few minutes to an earful of Norse defiance and then had him executed.
After that, Strongbow and Aoife ruled as king and queen of Leinster. It’s often said that life brings the most difficulty to newlywed couples in their first year. Certainly, Strongbow and Aoife had no easy time of it. Out there, in the wilds of Ireland, in the counties not yet under Norman control—beyond the Pale—tribes were assembling armies and heading to attack Dublin.