The Making of Ireland and its Undoing, 1200-1600

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Preface

Many reasons have prevented the writing of Irish history. The invading people effaced the monuments of a society they had determined to extirpate, and so effectively extinguished the memory of that civilization that it will need a generation of students to recover and iriterpret its records. The people of the soil have been in their subjugation debarred from the very sources of learning, and from the opportunities of study and association which are necessary for the historical scholar. The subject too has transcended the courage of the Irish patriot. Histories of nations have been inspired in times of hope and confidence, when the record of triumph has kindled the writers and gladdened ‘the readers. The only story’of a “decline and fall” was composed when the dividing width of Europe, with the span of a dozen centuries, and the proud consciousness of the heir of the conquering race, encouraged the historian to describe the catastrophe of a ruined State.

Thus the history of the Irish people has been left unrecorded, as though it had never been; as though indeed, according to some, the history were one of dishonour and rebuke,, €s

It is the object of ‘these studies to gather together some records of the civilization of Ireland before the x PREFACE immense destruction of the Tudor wars; to trace her progress in industry, in wealth, and in learning; and to discover the forces that ruined this national life, Three reasons have led me to undertake this work.

It was the fashion among the Tudor statesmen, very confident of their methods, to talk of “the godly conquest,” “the perfecting of Ireland.” The writers of triumphant nations are enabled to give the story of their successes from their own point of view; but from this partial tale not even the victorious peoples can learn what the warfare has implied, nor know how to count the cost nor credit the gain. The present state of Europe is the result of vast destructions and vast obliterations. The aspect of its troubled civilization may one day lead to a new and more searching study of the conditions of such destructions, with their interminable penalties both to the conqueror and the conquered. In the history of Ireland we may learn to measure the prodigious and endless waste of a “godly conquest” and of the “perfecting” of one race by another.

There is no more pious duty to all of Ireland birth than to help in recovering from centuries of obloquy the memory of noble men, Irish and Anglo-Irish, who built up the civilization that once adorned their country. To them has been meted out the second death,—the lot feared beyond all else by men of honour. They have been buried by the false hands of strangers in the deep pit of contempt, reproach, and forgetfulness— an unmerited grave of silence and of shame.

The Irish of to-day have themselves suffered by the calumny of their dead. They, alone among the nations,

PREFACE xl have been taunted with ancestors sunk in primitive disorders, incapable of development in the land they wasted. A picture of unrelieved barbarism “hateful to God” served to justify to strangers the English extirpation of Irish society ; and has been used to depress the hearts of the Irish themselves. For their birthright— they have been told—they have inherited the failings of their race, and by the verdict ‘of the ages have been proclaimed incapable of success in their own land, or of building up there an ordered society, trade, or culture, and have indeed ever proved themselves a people ready “to go headlong to the Devil” if England “seek not speedy remedy to prevent the same.” Thus their energy has been lowered, and some natural pride abated. It is in the study of their history alone that Irishmen will find this just pride restored, and their courage assured.

In this effort however Irishmen are confronted with a singular difficulty. In no other country in the world has it been supposed the historian’s business to seek out every element of political instability, every trace of private disorder, every act of personal violence, every foreign slander, and out of these alone, neglecting all indications of industry or virtue, to depict a national life. Irish annals are still in our own days quoted by historians as telling merely the tale of a corrupted land— feuds and battles, murderings and plunderings ; with no town or church or monastery founded, no law enacted, no controversy healed by any judgment of the courts. If the same method had been followed for England, what an appalling story we should have had of that mediaeval

« Xii PREFACE time, of its land-thefts, its women-lifting, its local wars, the feuds handed on from father to son with their countless murders and atrocities, devastating for generations whole country sides. In Germany or Italy or France the picture of anarchy would appear like hell let loose on earth. In all other histories however than that of Ireland a certain convention has been observed. Men by some high instinct of faith have agreed amid all disorders to lay stress on every evidence of reason, humanity, justice, and to leave out of the record the tale of local barbarities, the violences of the rich, the brutalities of the ignorant and the starving. No human society could endure in fact ‘if these made up in any nation the sole history of the people. In our country alone the common convention has been reversed, and the comparison of its culture with that of other lands has thus been falsified at the outset. ‘No man,” cried a learned Irishman as the torrent of accusation swelled against his countrymen, “can be so inveterately attached ‘to vice as not to break its chains occasionally, and perform some virtuous action.” ?

Ireland indeed not only shared in the sufferings and confusions of the whole mediaeval world, but had moreover to contend with a ceaseless war of conquest. But in Ireland not less than elsewhere, side by side with mediaeval violence the forces of learning and piety and humanity were maintaining the promise of better things. This was the justification of its patriotic sons in the passion of their sorrow at the destruction of their national civilization.2 “So are we all impelled,

1Cambrensis Eversus iii, 247. Tb. i. 109,

PREFACE xiii by an instinct of nature,” wrote one in the hour of her darkest ruin, “to centre all the affections of our souls on the land that gave us birth. In solitude it engrosses all our thoughts; in society it is our favourite topic; and even when the clouds of woe have closed over it it still commands our sympathies.”

ALICE STOPFORD GREEN.

There are few workers, as will be seen, in this period of Irish history, One student, H. Egan Kenny, has for some years made a laborious study from firsthand sources of the commercial and industrial life of Ireland throughout the Middles Ages; and I give him my sincere thanks for the valuable help he has most kindly given, me, both in suggestions and in corrections.

CHAPTER I. Intss ComMERCE - - -~

II. Irish InpustRies ,- - - - III. Country Lirr- - - - - IV. THe War on Irish Trappe - - V. Tue Towns AND THE CLans - - VI. Tue Ruin or tHE Towns -~— -

PART if EDUCATION AND LEARNING

VII. Irtsh LEARNING -~ ie t Z VIII. Tue Irish at Oxrorpn - - [X. Tue Nationa, Epucation”— - = X. Desrructrion oF Irish LEARNING” -

XI. Tur New Learnine m < “ XII. Foreicn UNIVERSITIES - - =

InDEx - = 7 = =

SOME ABBREVIATIONS OF BOOKS CITED.

Papers Foreign and Domestic, Henry vii. ... Pap. F. and D.

State Papers, reign of Henry vil. Record Commission .., St. Pap.

Carew, Calendar of State Papers ... Car. ‘

Calendar of State Papers ... C.S.P. : :

Calendar of Documents, Ireland, ed. Sweetman ... Cal. Doc. Ireland.

Cambrensis Eversus, ed. Kelly. Dublin, 1848 ... Camb. Ev.

Annals of the Four Masters ... 4 M.

Annals of Ulster ... An. Uls.

Stafford, Pacata Hibernia ... Pac. Hib.

O’Grady, Catalogue of MSS. in British Museum ... O’Grady, Cat. MSS.

Kuno Meyer, The Triads of Ireland, 1906 ... Triads, K. Meyer.

Collins, Letters and Memoirs of the Sidneys ... Sidney Lett., Sidney Mem.

History of Sir J. Perrot, ed. 1728 ... Perrot’s Life.

Libel of English Policy, Political Songs, Rolls Series _«. Lib. Eng. Policy.

Rimeri Faedera ... Rim.

Holinshed’s Chronicle ... Hol.

Original Letters illustr. hist. of Church in Ireland under Ed. 1v., Mary, and Eliz., ed. Shirley, 1851 ... Shirley’s Orig. Let.

Hanmer, Chronicle of Ireland. Dublin, 1633 ... Hanmer’s Chron.

Campion, History of Ireland. Dublin, 1633 ... Camp.

Desiderata Curiosa Hibernica, 1772 ... Des. Cur. Hib.

Tribes of Hy-Fiachrach, ed. O’Donovan ... Hy-Fiachrach.

Lives of Saints: book of Lismore, ed. Stokes ... Lismore Lives.

Gilbert’s Facsimiles of National MSS. ... Fac. Nat. MSS.

Eriu, Journal of the School of Irish Learning. Dublin .., Eriu.

Tracts Relating to Ireland, Statute of Kilkenny. Irish Arch. Soc. 1846 ... Tr. Rel. to Irel. Stat. Kilk. '

The Pilgrim: by W. Thomas, ed. Froude, 1861 .,. Froude’s Pilgrim:

O’Fiaherty, Description of West Connacht .., W. Conn.! ge

Hardiman, History of Galway ... Hard. Gal.

Historical MSS. Commission ... H.M.C.

Gilbert’s Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin ... Cal. Rec. Dub.

Macnamara, Story of an Irish Sept in Clare ... Ir. Sept.

Brady (W. M.) State Papers concerning Irish Church in time of Elizabeth. 1868 ... Brady’s St. Pap.

Hogan (Edmund) Ibernia Ignatiana, 1540-1607. Dublin, 1880 ... Hogan, Ibernia Ignat.

Lombard’s Spicilegium Ossoriensis, ed. Moran ... Lombard, ed. Moran,

Macpherson, Annals of Commerce ... Macph. 1805. ‘

Irische Texte ... Ir. Texte.

PART J.

TRADE AND INDUSTRIES.

I, IRISH COMMERCE.

IRELAND—a name by which the whole island

was known in southern France at least as early c. 1000. as 1000 a.D.—was distinguished then as “that

very wealthy country in which there were twelve

cities, with wide bishoprics, and a king, and which had its own language and Latin letters.””? Hundreds of years later it was still wealthy. c. 1450. » From hence to Rome in all Christendom, men

said, was no ground or land like to Ireland, so

large, so good, so plenteous, or so rich:” -“none other but a very Paradise, delicious of all pleasaunce, to respect and regard of any other 1536. land in this world.”®

Ireland had long been desired by continental

peoples. In Roman times her channels and harbours, opening to Gaul and Spain, were better known, than those of Britain from the frequency

*Chronicle of Ademar, monk of Angouléme, before 1031 ; Labbe, Nova Bibl. MSS. tom. 2, p. 177. *Lib. Eng. Policy (Pol. Songs, Rolls Series). 3St. Pap. 1. iii, 31. ; A

"3 THE NORMAN SETTLEMENT ab. 82.0f commerce and merchants, and Agricola stationed troops in Britain fronting the island, with an idea of rounding off the empire. But the Romans stopped short of the conquest of . Ireland. The Norsemen pried out the country and seized or planted trading towns on its coasts. The Danes came with an immense fleet, carrying their. wives and children, to extirpate the Irish and occupy in their stead that very wealthy land ; ror5.and king Cnut would have made Ireland an outlying part of a vast Northern Empire with its centre at London. That dream too was defeated. From the Welsh cliffs the Norman 1087- William Rufus looked across the Channel towards 740° Treland—a land very rich in plunder, and famed for the good temperature of the air, the fruitfulness of the soil, the pleasant and commodious seats for habitation, and safe and large ports v and havens lying open for traffic.” “For the conquest of that land,” said he, “I will gather together all the ships of my kingdom, and will ° make of them a bridge to cross over.” ‘ After so tremendous a threat as that,” said the king of Leinster, “did the king add, ‘if the Lord 1175. will’?” Henry of Anjou, the empire-maker, established the first lasting settlement of foreigners to dominate Ireland, sat in his timber palace in Dublin, and made treaties with the Irish chiefs,

1Gir..Cambr. Itin. Cambriae, lib. ii. c. 1 (vol. vi. p, 109, ed. Dimock); Freeman’s Rufus, ii. 94.

IRISH AND NORMAN UNION 3

~ His knights, Norman, French, and Welsh, seized lands, built castles, declared themselves conquerors, and, themselves vanquished by the Irish civilization, turned into patriots in their new country. For,” said a mediaeval Irish writer, “the old chieftains of Erin prospered under 1315: these princely English lords, who were our chief rulers, and who had given up their foreignness for a pure mind, their surliness for good manners, and their stubbornness for sweet mildness, and who had given up their perverseness for hospitality.”! Successive generations of newcomers cast in their lot with their adopted land, till there was not more than twenty miles about Dublin that obeyed English law.

Danish and Norman invasions had interrupted the growth of Ireland, but had not arrested it. The union of the Danish settlers with the surrounding population was followed by a remarkable movement in the twelfth century towards an ; organized national life. This was broken by the violence of the Norman invasion, but among Normans and Irish again centuries of intercourse overlaid the first animosities of war with kindlier ties of co-operation, and in the city as in the country a new race was born of “Ireland men,” alike zealous for the wealth, the liberties, the self-government of the land which was their common home; so that the fifteenth century 1 Tribes and Customs of Hy-Many, ed. O’Donovan, 1843, p- 136.

4 THE COMING OF THE TRADERS saw the new beginnings of a national reconstruction. The country meanwhile had grown in civilization and wealth. Her people, skilled craftsmen at home, traded over Europe, and “through their constant communication with the Continent kept in relation with foreign learning, while maintaining their own culture.

_ It was in fact the activity, the importance, and the riches of Ireland that drew to it the attention of commercial England under the Tudor kings. For in the spacious days of their business adventures, wealth that was not in English hands seemed to practical Englishmen resources merely wasted and lost. Traders and adventurers overran -the country, and gave vent to their anger.at the people’s unwillingness to hand over to them all the profits of their labour. Ireland, said the speculators, “hath not shewed herself so bountiful a mother in pouring forth riches as she proveth herself an envious step-dame.” They were shocked at the sloth of him, “who will not by his painful travail reap the fruit and commodity that the earth yieldeth” for the benefit apparently of the English invader. They cried out to the world that the Irishman was idle, negligent, without enterprise, the profligate waster of his rich resources. “Diligent Englishmen” were needed to replace these “luskish loiterers,” and so fair a land made ‘perfect by “the bringing in of a better race,” The true answer to these political legends can

IRISH ENTERPRISE 5 only be given by a scientific study of mediaeval Irish history, such as has never yet been attempted. But though Irish records have been deliberately wasted and destroyed, though no research has yet been made in foreign archives for the continental trade of Ireland, there are yet indications of the commerce and the wide enterprise of the country when Henry viii. saw its wealth and let loose on it the Tudor wars. The practical Englishman of that day had himself no belief in fictions of Irish lethargy and incapacity for business. The English difficulty, in’ fact, was how to destroy the trading and industrial energies of their rivals. For if at one time the Irish were charged with having no activities, at another it was said they had too much. “Divers Irish enemies of our Lord the King” were accused in an act of parliament 1429. of raising and holding among them different fairs and markets where English colonists were drawn to buy: and sell, and Irish enemies gained great custom and profit in their too successful competition: and fifty years after the lament was renewed—to wit, they have com- 1480. menced markets in the country of O'Reilly and

the country of O’Farrell, at Cavan, Granard, Longford, and other places, which, if they be long continued, will cause great riches to the King’s enemies.” }

1Tr. Rel. to Irel. Stat. Kilk, 115, 117.

6 THE FAIRS

Ireland, in fact, had many an ancient fair, some long forgotten, some which have left at least a memory; like the Fair of Teltown, renowned down to the Middle Ages ;! the Fair of Connacht ;? the Fair of Clapping of Hands ;° the Fair of Carmain;* Aonach, now Nenagh, “the place of fairs’’; Monaster-anenagh;° Killeagh in Offaly; Dunananie near the landing-place of the sons of Usnach, a trading place of the Scots.° The people of Tuam gather to this day in a bare field three miles out of the town, remote from any shop or public-house, to an ancient Fair of Tulach na Dala (the Hillock of Assembly), and, despising all persuasion to bring the fair into their town, still buy and sell once a year on the silent spot formerly peopled and prosperous by the industty of their fathers. There was the later market town of Port-na-Cairge’ near Boyle, built by Cormac MacDermot; Rory O’Connor’s stone-built town of Ballymote; Tirerill in Sligo;

-and many more from end to end of the country.

This trading activity reached its highest point at a time when the Irish had in effect secured for themselves the possession of their country ° and the use of their law, and English influence had sunk low. The fifteenth century was the

Sy, The “fair of crosses” in Antrim. Irish Arch. Soc. 1841, 31. 7 Annals of Boyle.

GROWTH OF IRISH LIFE 7 time, of the great Irish revival. After three hundred years of war the English were in fact penned into a tract around Dublin—“ the little Place,” as they called the Pale, “out of which they durst not peep.”! ‘There was not left in Dublin, Meath, Louth, and Kildare, scarce 1435. 30 miles in length and 20 in breadth there as a man may surely ride or go in answer to the King’s writs and his commandments.”? In those days 30 miles from Dublin was “by west of English law.” ‘Many folk doth 1515. enquire the cause why that the Irish folk be grown so strong and the King’s subjects so feeble, and fallen in so great rebellion for the more part.”*® “Your Highness,” the deputy 1536. wrote to Henry viii, “must understand that the .English blood of the English conquest is in manner worn out of this land, and at all seasons in manner, without any restoration, is diminished and enfeebled. ... And, contrarywise, the Irish blood ever more and more, without such decay, encreaseth.”* “For the English husbandmen . . . goeth daily into England and 1537. never after returneth, and in their stead none can be had but Irish.”*® In that decay of English interference Irish industries multiplied, new markets _were founded, and the old added new activities

1 Hav. 355; Hol. vi. 21-2. 2 Gilbert’s Viceroys, 331- 3St. Pap. 1. iii. 11. 4St. Pap. 11. iii, 338. 5 Luttrell, St. Pap. IL. ili. 509.

8 IRISH TRADING CENTRES and prosperity, with much exchange of gold and silver: Irish thoneys called Reillys, an Act alleged,’ do increase * from day to day to the hurt of the King’s mint, and great carriage of plate was made into England.

All Ireland shared in this prosperity. In Wexford the fair’at Eniscorthy* on Great Lady

‘Day ‘‘is: far the greatest of any in Ireland, and held yearly, and usually at a day certain”; it would be hard to number or describe, the Annals say, all the steeds, horses, gold, silver, foreign wares at that fair. Irish markets were developed at Youghal, incorporated under earl Thomas of Desmond, at Dungarvan and Maynooth.’ Perhaps the greatest extension of commerce was in the border countries between Leinster and Ulster, running from’ Dundalk to Sligo by Longford, Granard, and Cavan. In Cavan, lying in the ° shelter of the morasses and mazes of Lough

Oughter, we. may still trace the remains of a peaceful and undefended open trading centre— the sunny valley with gardens stretching up the hills, the great monastery, and by its side on a low lift of grass the palace and business centre of the O’Reillys, among the greatest of Irish: trading chiefs, whose money was spread by their traffic over all Ireland, and was even “commonly current” in England. The Maguires were famed

1Ir. St. 1447. 2Car. ii. 343; 4 M. p. 1631. 3Smith’s Waterford ; Gilbert’s Viceroys, 414. :

IRISH ROADWAYS “9 for the husbandry, crafts, and commerce that occupied the men of Enniskillen,’ It was such markets as these that the English legislators deplored, exhorting all English traders to clear out of them, and by a rigid boycott doom these busy Irishmen to ruin.

From market to market* the country was traversed by roads or by water-ways. It is commonly supposed that the Irish had no roads, and indeed it is evident that the people obliterated all passages before the advance of invading troops. But where the English armies had not yet penetrated, the deputy was surprised to see the highways and paths so well beaten.’ Irish chiefs, in fact, were bound to maintain the highways, and compensation was paid to them for the cutting up of the road.** The five .ways that led to Tara through every province of Ireland. were in full use as late as the sixteenth century. The “sanctuary of Ireland,” in a proverb of the early middle” ages, “was the House of Cairnech upon the Road of Asal,”® that ran from Tara - across West-Meath. The king of Gowran, one of the three independent Kings of Great Munster, had his house on the “ noisy’ ’ or frequented Pass of Gowran leading to the north, and the earls of Ormond as their first adventure planted themselves on that road and took its tolls. A second

1See p. 76. 2Ir. Stat. 1458, cap. ii. 3 Pac. Hib. 77. *O’Grady, Cat. MSS. 81, 384. 5 Triads, K. Meyer.

1d ROADWAYS AND BRIDGES of the three kings ruled at Raithlean, where the - O’Mahonys maintained the Road of the Chariots to the north, the Road of the Mules below, and the Ford of Spoils eastward.'. There was an open road* that ran between Rathconyll*® and 1478. Queylan, used only by the “Irish enemies of the King,” which the invaders viewed with avarice, where were to be seen trains of bullocks and horsepacks of merchandise and victuals, to the profit of these “Irish enemies.” Without roads hae Turlough O’Connor would scarcely have built "t5”* three bridges, Athlone and Athcroghta over the Shannon and Dunlo upon the Suck, a few years only after William Rufus had made his bridge 1319. across the Thames. ‘There hath been a worthy prelate, canon in the cathedral church of Kildare, named Maurice Jake, who among the rest of his charitable deeds builded the bridge of Kilcoollen, 1Cork Hist. Journ., 1907, xiii. 27-30; Kilk. Arch. Journ., July 1871, 536. Raithlean is in the parish of Castlehaven, barony of Carbery West (E.D.), Co. Cork. »The barony of , Kinalmeaky or Cinéal mBéice was the tribe land of a sept of O’Mahonys. (v. Cork Hist. and Arch. Soc. J., 1907, 28.)

2Tr. Rel. to Irel. St. of Kilk. 82-3 n.

3 Rathconyll is probably Rathconnell about three miles north-east of Mullingar; there is another Rathconnell in Kildare. Queylan would probably now be Anglicised “Cullen,” but where it is I am unaware. This trading road may possibly have been the ancient Slighe Asail. Rathconnell is at any rate in Magh

Asail.

‘Hard. Gal. 39 n. Athlone castle and bridge were built 1129, 4 M. p. 1033; Athcroghta was by the ford of the Shannon opposite the modern town of Shannon Harbour in King’s County; and Dunlo was part of the town of Ballinasloe.

MEDIAEVAL ROADS II and the next year following he builded in like manner the bridge of Leighlin, to the great and daily commodity of all such as are occasioned to travel in those quarters.”’ In later days O’Brien, lord of Thomond—whose people were said to be in manner the best in Ireland, civil and well fed, and who had the best havens and the hardiest warriors—made his famous bridge 1506. over the Shannon of good timber, in length 300 paces. Roads from one monastery to another served the double purpose of religion and of trade, such as the famous pilgrims’ way which led from the east to Clew Bay, traversed by pilgrims to Croagh Patrick and by traders to Westport and Burris.

We know how the Roman roads driven across ‘England by a conquering Empire formed the main channels of communication over that country till a long use of some 1400 years ,brought them to decay. For after Rome England had no mediaeval road-makers who could overcome the difficulties of bog and mountain. In Ireland ‘the traveller who drives from Dundrum among the hillocks of Monaghan, with sinuous marshes creeping up every hollow and valley, or who follows the threatening passes from Sligo to Enniskillen, or crosses the shaking bogs, or the

1Hol. vi. 45. Manus O’Conor in order to build a bridge over the river Geirctheach in Leitrim had a chapel demolished in the fall of which he was himself killed, 1244. O’Grady, Cat. 332-3.

12° | WATERWAYS mountains of Munster or of Wicklow, will ‘ not wonder that the old Irish were content in | such places to carry their trafic on mountain ponies and pack-horses along paths known to the people. They continually used too the natural waterways of the country, now neglected. The ruins of towns on the water’s edge, of churches and villages and little ports beside them, still tell of the once active life on lake and river. A fleet of boats on the Shannon bore “the trade of merchandise on the river,”? and no monopoly was more eagerly sought for by later English adventurers. The lakes. of Leitrim and Cavan, the Upper and Lower Erne where at Enniskillen the masts of Maguire’s fleet stood as it were a grove along the shore,? Lough Oughter and Lough Neagh, the Bann, the Barrow and the Nore and the Suir,® were gay with boats—three large and navigable rivers these last, by which inland commodities could be cheaply carried to Waterford from the very centre of the kingdom, out of the seven counties washed by those rivers and other adjacent lands. “ Would God,” cried a deputy, weary of his toilsome marches, “ that all carriage was by water!” xi. The inland trade fed and was in turn supported me by a large European commerce. There was 1Car. ii. 284, 371; C.S.P. 1590, 3743 1580, 271. 1Q’Grady, Cat. 431. *13th Eliz c. ii; C.S.P. 1552, 126, 4Smith’s Waterford, 168.

-

CONTINENTAL COMMERCE 13 extensive Irish trade with France, Spain, and Italy as far south as Naples: merchants of the society of the Ricardi of Lucca were dwelling 1294. in Ireland, and foreigners of the dominion of the king of France, who carried their merchandise to sell... Youghal merchants traded in Bordeaux. Irish ships sailed to Bruges, each 1265. mariner allowed to carry as his provision four 1323: barrels of beef, salmon, suet, butter, and lard. At the request of Ghent, Bruges, Ipres, and 1387. Franc, Phillippe le Hardi gave a special safe conduct to Irish merchants to settle in the Low Countries with their goods and families ;* and ‘ships of Ireland’? were long known in Antwerp.° 1565. Wine was carried by Irish navigators in their own vessels; the chiefs were used to make the pilgrimage to Compostella, sometimes. two or three times, and commerce followed the road of pilgrimage and intercourse. So frequent. was ocean traffic that when Chester wanted to send messengers in a hurry to Spain, they went by way of Ireland as the quickest route, a fact

1Cal. Doc. Ireland, ed. Sweetman, 77-80. Edward 1. (5294) for the Ricardi debts owed to him ordered the Lucca merchants in Ireland to be attached and not allowed to leave. He also ordered the goods of the French merchants to be seized, and forbade Irish exports to France; and took toll on the goods of Irish merchants for his war with France.

2Gilliodts Van Severen Cartulaire de Vancienne Estaple de Bruges, t. i. pp. 49, 50, 87, 89, 156, 358 n., 424, 435 (Bruges, 1904). “

3Shirley, 175; Macp. i. 706.

15900.

a4 THE IRISH HARBOURS which shows the number of Spanish trading ships | in Irish waters. Capacious harbours, where navies might lie at anchor, are now left vacant and unfrequented, so that scarce a sail save that of a poor fisherman’s boat can be seen on their broad waters. But every port in the circuit of Ireland was then filled with ships busy in the Continental trade, and in 1570 Stanihurst reckoned 88 “chief haven towns.” ?

A rapid circuit round the coasts of Ireland may give some idea of the business done in these harbours. The ships of Bretons, Spaniards, French and Scots sailed up the narrow seas of the east. There Wexford, Dublin, and Drogheda had their own shipping; in case of danger Drogheda could successfully man its fleet® as well as Dublin. They traded with Chester, Gloucester, Chepstow, and Bristol— a commodious and safe receptacle for all ships directing their course for the same from Ireland” *—supplying wine at times to these ports, and they imported stores of powder, lead, and ammunition, which they sold to the Irish.” Dublin had a very large Continental trade, its great fair of S. James crowded with foreign merchants, its market “stored by strangers” with coal and fruit and wine, carpets, broad-cloth