Divided Gaels: Gaelic cultural identities in Scotland and Ireland c. 1200–c. 1650 Wilson McLeod (Oxford University Press, £50) ISBN 0 199 247226 Ulster and the Isles in the fifteenth century: the lordship of the Clann Domhnaill of Antrim Simon Kingston (Four Courts Press, £55) ISBN 1 851 827293 In the wake of the establishment … Read more
Niav Gallagher outlines how the Franciscans arrived in Ireland c. 1231 and enjoyed over a century of expansion and consolidation despite racial tensions. According to the thirteenth-century chronicler Thomas Eccleston, the first Franciscan friars to arrive in the British Isles landed at Dover on 10 September 1224. Within a few years houses of the order … Read more
It was Milo Sweteman’s fate to follow in the footsteps of men more memorable than himself. He came from English settler stock in Kilkenny and was probably still a child in the 1320s when his bishop and future patron, Richard Ledred, ripped local colonial society asunder by instigating the trial of Alice Kytler on charges … Read more
Very few Viking sites outside the major towns have ever been discovered in Ireland, and none outside Dublin has been excavated since the 1940s. And yet historical records such as the Irish annals describe many occupied Viking sites in the ninth- and tenth-century Irish countryside, often referring to them as longphorts. Longphorts and rural … Read more
Sir, —Desmond Fennell (HI 13.5, Sept./Oct. 2005) avoids the Dark Agesentirely when the Church so ruthlessly imposed its dedication tosuperstition and ignorance that the Celtic Church in Ireland,sufficiently remote to escape the worst of its baneful influence, hadto rescue continental Europe. The protection of Charles the Baldallowed the best of those pioneers, the critical-thinking Irish … Read more