|
|
|
Edward marched south from Ulster only to meet a formidable army under the command of John de Bermingham at the hill of Faughart near Dundalk. There Edward Bruce, who had crowned himself King of Ireland only a few miles away two years before, was defeated and killed. Not only the English rejoiced at his death: the Annals of Connacht contain this arresting entry for the year 1318:
Edward Bruce, he who was the common ruin of the Gaels and Foreigners of Ireland, was by the Foreigners of Ireland killed at Dundalk by dint of fierce fighting…and never was there a better deed done for the Irish than this, since the beginning of the world and the banishing of the Formorians from Ireland. For in this Bruce’s time, for three years and a half, falsehood and famine and homicide filled the country, and undoubtedly men ate each other in Ireland.
The Bruce invasion had led to the devastation of much of the island but it was the English colony there that had suffered most. In more senses than one, the climate of the times was to accelerate the contraction of the Lordship of Ireland in the fourteenth century. A steady deterioration of the weather across the northern hemisphere brought in its wake a succession of poor harvests and outbreaks of disease amongst grazing animals. Norse settlers, for example, were forced by starvation to abandon Greenland to the Inuit. Reports of cannibalism in Europe were made with greater regularity. Was this global cooling the result of volcanic eruptions in Iceland? We cannot be certain. Dendrochronological data – that is, the interpretation of oak-tree growth rings – demonstrates a general lowering of summer temperatures. What is evident is the proliferation of reports, from a wide variety of sources, telling of hunger and disease. These sources include the Annals of Connacht:
1317: Great Famine this year throughout Ireland…
1318: Snow the like of which had not been seen for many a long year…
1322: Great cattle-plague throughout Ireland, the like of which had never been known before…
1324: The same cattle-plague was in all Ireland this year. It was called the Mael Domnaig…
1325: the cattle-plague throughout Ireland still…
1327: A great and widespread visitation of the smallpox throughout Ireland this year, which carried off both lowly and great.
1328: much thunder and lightning this year, whereby much of the fruit and produce of all Ireland was ruined, and the corn grew up white and blind…A great and intolerable wind this summer, with scarcity of food and clothing…A general visitation of the sickness called slaedan [influenza], throughout Ireland. It lasted three or four days with each person whom it attacked, and it was next to death for him…
1335: Heavy snow in the spring, which killed most of the small birds of all Ireland…
1338: Nearly all the sheep in Ireland died this year…
1339: The cattle and winter grass of Ireland suffered much from frost and snow…
1358: A heavy shower fell in Carbury in the summer, each hail-stone thereof fully as big as a crab-apple…
1363; a great wind this year, which wrecked churches and houses and sank many ships and boats…
The thirteenth century had been a time of population growth and rising prosperity. Prospects seemed good for the many English attracted over by the opportunity to get land in Ireland, celebrated in an anonymous poem of the time;
I am of Ireland
And of the Holy land
Of Ireland.
Good sir, pray I thee
For of saint charité
Come and dance with me
In Ireland.
The ensuing century was, in contrast, a very different one for inhabitants of the Irish Lordship.
By the beginning of the fourteenth century only mountainous, boggy and generally infertile areas had not been conquered. These included: the Dublin-Wicklow Mountains; the Slieve Bloom Mountains and the Bog of Allen in the midlands; wilder parts of west Cork and Kerry; and Connemara. Though Hugh de Lacy and the Richard de Burgo had extended their Earldom along the north coast to Inishowen, by far the most extensive region remaining under Gaelic rule was central and western Ulster: officials in Dublin referred to this part of the north outside their control as the ‘Great Irishry’.
Acute food shortages made it very tempting for the Gaelic Irish to burst out of their impoverished lands to plunder and seek to recover the fertile plains their forebears had lost to the Normans. Their attacks became ever more successful after the colony had been ravaged by the Black Death.
|
| Back |
|
