Irish Nationality

								

civilisation had not given way an inch to the strangers.

CHAPTER V
THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL
1014-1169

After the battle of Clontarf in 1014 the Irish had a hundred and fifty
years of comparative quiet. "A lively, stirring, ancient and
victorious people," they turned to repair their hurts and to build up
their national life.
Throughout the Danish wars there had been a growth of industry and
riches. No people ever made a successful national rally unless they
were on the rising wave of prosperity. It is not misery and
degradation that bring success. Already Ireland was known in France as
"that very wealthy country in which there were twelve cities, and wide
bishoprics, and a king, and that had its own language, and Latin
letters."
But the position of the Gaels was no longer what it had been before
the invasions. The "Foreigners" called constantly for armed help from
their people without, and by political alliances and combinations
fostered war among the Irish states themselves. Nearly a hundred years
after Clontarf king Magnus of Norway (1103) led the greatest army that
ever marched conquering over Ireland. In a dark fen the young giant
flamed out a mark for all, with his shining helmet, his golden hair
falling long over his red silken coat, his red shield, and laid
thereon a golden lion. There he fell by an Irish axe. The glory and
terror of "Magnus of the swift ships," "Magnus of the terrible
battles," was sung in Ireland for half-a-dozen centuries after that
last flaring-up of ancient fires.
The national life, moreover, was now threatened by the settlement of
an alien race, strangers to the Irish tradition, strangers to the
Irish idea of a state, and to their feeling of a church. The sea-kings
had created in Dublin an open gateway into Ireland, a gateway like
Quebec in Canada, that commanded the country and that the country
could never again close from within. They had filled the city with
Scandinavian settlers from the English and Welsh coasts--pioneers of
English invasion. A wealthy and compact community living on the
seaboard, trading with all Europe, inclined to the views of their
business clients in England and the Empire, their influence doubled
the strength of the European pressure on Ireland as against the Gaelic
civilisation.
To the division of peoples within the Irish state the Danes added also
the first division in the Irish church. Olaf Cuaran, overlord of
northmen of Dublin and York, had been baptized (943) in Northumberland
by the archbishop of Canterbury, in presence of the English king. He
formed the first converted Danes into a part of the English Church, so
that their bishops were sent to be ordained at Canterbury. Since the
Irish in 603 had refused to deal with an archbishop of the English,
this was the first foothold Canterbury had got in Ireland. It was the
rending in two of the Irish tradition, the degrading of the primacy of
Armagh, the admission of a foreign power, and the triumph of the