The Galloglass: Gaelic Mercenary Warriors

For more than 400 years, Irish warfare was dominated by the Galloglass, elite Norse-Gael mercenary warriors who reshaped battles with their two-handed sparth axes and claymores. Why did Gaelic chieftains and Norman lords alike rely on these foreign fighters? And what drove the Galloglass to fight with such ferocity that English observers would later write, "When they strike they inflict a dreadful wound"? To find out more, Matt Lewis is joined by Fergus Cannan-Braniff, a descendant of Rob Roy MacGregor and Robert the Bruce, and author of Galloglass 1250-1600: Gaelic Mercenary Warrior. MORE Castles and the Conquest of Ireland https://open.spotify.com/episode/4mQSY11BBAru3Q3tDQgXWA Medieval Ireland: Death & Politics https://open.spotify.com/episode/3sGKfux9jioLnvOUcydbov Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Amy Haddow. The producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including Matt's series Castles that Made Ireland, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:01Matt Lewis?

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• 1:21Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots, and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 2:07Matt Lewis?

  The date is August 19th, 1504. The place is Knockdough, County Galway, Ireland. Two armies face each other, their banners snapping fiercely in the wind. Among their ranks on both sides are the legendary Galloglass. Elite Scottish mercenaries imposing in stature, grim-faced and muscled, whose very name strikes fear into the hearts of their enemies. As the battle cry goes up, the earth trembles underfoot as these warriors charge uphill into a hail of arrows. Their massive two-handed axes, the dreaded spart, glint in the sunlight, ready to cleave through armour and bone alike.

• 2:51Matt Lewis?

  By nightfall, the field is strewn with thousands of bodies. Entire battalions wiped out in a single day of savage combat. Only one much-reduced company survives, out of nine Italians. This day of unparalleled carnage cements the reputation of the Galloglass as among the most fearsome fighters in medieval Europe. But who were these Galloglass? What drove them to fight with such ferocity that English observers would later write: “When they strike, they inflict a dreadful wound.” To discuss the Galloglass, I’m delighted to be joined by Fergus Cannon Braniff. He’s actually a descendant of Rob Roy MacGregor and Robert the Bruce,

• 3:35Matt Lewis?

  who’s worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum and now teaches at the Skinner’s School, Royal Tunbridge Wells. He’s the author of “Galloglass: 1250-1600 Gaelic Mercenary Warriors”, published by Osprey in 2010. And his new book, “The Gaelic World at War”, will be published later this year by Helion.

• 3:57Matt Lewis?

  Fergus, welcome to Gone Medieval. It's fantastic to have you with us.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here.

• 4:04Matt Lewis?

  We think of them as cool warriors, but how much do we actually know about what a Galloglass is? So I wondered if you could give us an idea to begin with. When do we first begin to hear of Galloglass? When and where do they originate from?

• 4:18Speaker 02

  We first hear the term Galloglass being used in the 1200s, and it's clear that they are Scottish warriors coming from the west of Scotland. On the other hand, I think actually it's more that people are coming up with a term then for something that was a long-established practice. Most of them are coming from the Hebrides, but also the West Highlands. And I suspect probably we could find some from Galway, which is the old forgotten Gaelic bit of Scotland in the South West. So the bits that by proximity, it's easy enough to get to Ireland. And we've got to understand that this is a time when

• 4:58Speaker 02

  for a lot of these people, these Galloglass, who go over as warriors to Ireland, that they're not going as foreigners, but they're people who feel very much part of a Gaelic culture. Probably a Highlander felt they had a lot more in common with an Irish chief than they did with the King of Scots or somebody living in Edinburgh. So what happens is, once they're in Ireland, they find that although there's a cultural familiarity, there are some distinctive qualities that Scottish warriors have, which are slightly different to the way Irish warriors have been fighting. Scotland seems to have had a very long history of having very high-quality, heavy infantry, something of the Norse tradition of two-handed

• 5:43Speaker 02

  axes, of wearing male armour.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  And affronting up to the enemy very fast on the battlefield. There's one very, very interesting quote from Foissard, the French chronicler of the Hundred Years' War, who talks about Scottish warriors not hesitating to just front up and attack straight away, often with double-handed axes. So the two-handed axe, spears, heavy two-handed weapons, was something that was popular in Scotland, possibly because they had lots of experience of fighting against English soldiers and later on against English soldiers using the longbow. So you needed to close in there before those arrows started destroying your own lines. So Gallic Glass really are usually described as Scottish mercenaries in Ireland, but maybe

• 6:30Speaker 02

  something we can talk about in a bit more detail, because I think mercenary isn't quite the full story. They are fighting for land, for wealth, for power, but actually they've become an established part of the Irish countryside. They're not really like the Swiss mercenaries or Landsknecht in that they don't attempt to take their services beyond Ireland. They are something that is Hebrides, West Highland and then into Ireland phenomenon. And really, they are warriors who fight for wealth and land but have a clear sense of pride in their culture, who also have a clear sense of certain ideological components to

• 7:13Speaker 02

  the way they fight, there's certain people they will and won't fight for. And what's fascinating about them is really they are supplying the thing that Ireland in the late Middle Ages needs most, and that's heavy infantry, because most of the Irish fighters are more lightly equipped, skirmishers and also skirmisher horsemen who are very, very tough and very, very skilled, much more so than historians have often given them credit. But the heavy infantry is the bit that's missing and that's the thing that the Scots are able to provide.

• 7:45Matt Lewis?

  And you mentioned that there is this cultural connection between Western Scotland and Ireland, so that Gallic Glass, as they move over from Scotland, wouldn't necessarily have thought they were moving to a foreign land, they would have thought that they were still in the same kind of arena. But what is it specifically that begins to draw them across to Ireland?

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that, I mean, the traditional explanation is that there's not enough land and money to go around in the Hebrides. So you have huge numbers of younger sons, young adventurers, people who need to go somewhere else and find a bit of money. On top of that, some of the Galloglass, although they become often fierce enemies of English power in Ireland, were actually, rather paradoxically, enemies of the Scottish Crown. So some of them actually had been against Robert the Bruce and had fallen out with the Scottish Crown and had had to leave in a hurry. So some of them in, and

• 8:45Speaker 02

  this is something we find that characterises a lot of late medieval Irish history, that there's all kinds of webs of factional interests, all kinds of rows going on between different families. And it's certainly not something where we can just say it's nation against nation. It's much more factional and about bloodlines and family interests and that.

• 9:07Matt Lewis?

  And so are there specific places in Ireland that they begin to appear, or are they spreading across the island of Ireland?

• 9:15Speaker 02

  They first turn up in the north, which is really a matter of geography. It's nearby. And the thing that makes them popular is that as well as being nearby, there's also clearly very large numbers available. Sometimes the term Galloglass is used too much to include other types of Scottish mercenary, because we also get a type from about the 15th century onwards who are called Red Shanks. Now, sometimes the whole lot just get lumped together under the umbrella term Galloglass. But really, the true Galloglass, we're talking about somebody who's wearing mail armour or padded armour, the two-handed axe, possibly spear, and they are recruited to be the heavy infantry within Ireland. Now, they turn up first of

• 10:00Speaker 02

  all in the north and they then spread. And they spread their bloodlines settling around the country. So that by the end of the Middle Ages, we find that they're being employed also by the English government in Ireland. And the Galloglass seems to have been pretty good at taking the best offer that was available to them. But it's obvious that wasn't necessarily where they felt their long-term interests lay. So sometimes the terms like Machiavellian or ruthless are used about Gallo Glass, and I think that's true up to a point. But at the same time, you can see that they are very, very strongly Gaelic in their strategic

• 10:44Speaker 02

  long-term interests. Clearly, they felt they wanted an Ireland that was not going to be Anglicised. They didn't want an Ireland that was going to be under English domination. But probably they didn't really want something that was going to be under too much domination from the King of Scotland either.

• 11:02Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. So do we see them being warmly welcomed? It sounds like they were, you know, comparatively formidable warriors, something that you said the Irish military was sort of missing in terms of a heavy infantry. So do we see them being kind of welcomed by the Irish chieftains? Are they being offered, you know, huge amounts of land for their service? Are they coveted?

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Yes, they are, and they're never in giant numbers. So the numbers are sometimes quite difficult to calculate because we're told that Gallo Glass would have one or two serving boys or serving men who would go with them, who would clean their armour, cook their meals. So each Gallo Glass is a sort of treated like a nobleman, that he comes with his little entourage. And you might then, if you were a very, very powerful Irish chief, be able to acquire, you know, perhaps a hundred of these. There are some Irish chiefs, most powerful ones, people like the Earl of Ormond, who at one time had six hundred. But a lot of Irish chiefs had none of them. And they were a severe drain on the local economy.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  And they cannot have been welcomed by the local populace because the way they were maintained is they were billeted on the local population and the local population had to provide them with lodging, free hospitality. And by the sounds of it, Gallo Glass and Kern, who were the light infantry of Gaelic Ireland, were often pretty badly behaved, especially the Kern, but also the Gallo Glass. The Gallo Glass also, once they got their feet under the table. Who got involved in local coups as well. So bringing them into your area as an Irish chief, you might well find that they're your most steadfast sentinels who will fight to

• 12:51Speaker 02

  the death for you. But you might also find that they get involved in uprisings to topple you as well. So there's something of a kind of a danger about having these people. And the most powerful Gallo Glass families, the McSweenes, people like that, some of the McDonald's, actually basically become Gaelic barons in their own right. And actually are military leaders, not just of Gallo Glass, but are able to raise their own horsemen, serving men, cairn, and so on.

• 13:25Matt Lewis?

  And do we see those names, those lineages, those families then becoming embedded in Irish society? I mean, do those names of Gallo Glasses who arrived in Ireland still exist in Ireland today?

• 13:37Speaker 02

  They do. Now, another thing that interests me a lot, my, my new book, which is, is coming out the end of this year, is looking at how I think we have underestimated the Irish military establishment. And we tend to think of these soldiers as just ferocious warriors. And actually, they were rather more complex figures than that. They had cultural interests. They were often patrons of local artists, local religious establishments. So the Gallo Glass, once they settle in Ireland, we do find people of Gallo Glass families who become clergymen. We find them engaging in much the same way that a local landowner

• 14:19Speaker 02

  of the late Middle Ages and Elizabethan era would be living. So they're, they're not just a warlord, but they are a local community leader of matters of faith, of crafts, arts, but also defence and their own military interests.

• 14:36Matt Lewis?

  And I wondered if we could just go back to, I guess, is the juiciest thing about the Gallo Glass. Let's talk about them fighting. Let's talk about them on the battlefield. Where do these stories of their kind of their legendary strength, their devastating effectiveness on the battlefield, where does all of that come from? What made them so special?

• 14:54Speaker 02

  The book I'm writing at the moment is about how we shouldn't get too carried away when we read these descriptions of wild Irishmen and of massive Scotsmen with axes, because clearly they were intimidating people. Clearly lots of them were not very nice people if you had them in your neighbourhood. But at the same time, actually, we can see within those accounts from the time that there were clear attempts made at a systematic military selection process. That's my current big theory, because we find terms like selected being used and chosen being used in conjunction with descriptions of them being large, big

• 15:37Speaker 02

  and tall. We get lots of descriptions of tall Highlanders, tall McSweenes and so on. And I think rather than just poetic flourishes, this is because they were actually attempting to choose the biggest, strongest men they could from their areas and recruit them to be their heavy infantry. Now, actually, that's pretty much what armies have been doing for centuries around the world, which is having big men to be grenadiers and guards, the light infantry, or the smaller men, the men with the lighter frames. And possibly that's actually what was going on in Ireland, that we get the skirmishers, the cairn, are the

• 16:17Speaker 02

  faster men, the Gallic glass are the bigger ones. Now, added to that, the Gallic glass also wore heavier armour than the cairn light infantry, and this must have added to their size. They were wearing quilted actants, gambassons, or actoons, as they called them in Scottish documents. They were wearing, often it seems from the art and the descriptions anyway, wearing tall, pointed bassinettes. Now, actually, that would have added to a sense of size and presence. I'm sure also, if we look at accounts of Highland warriors...

• 16:56Speaker 02

  There's quite a lot about how they had quite an intimidating presence. So I wonder also if some of the stuff about them seeming huge is that they seemed huge. But perhaps also that is part of their manner and their demeanor was very much of a forceful physical presence. I'd like to add to that, though, that it's clear that in the Highlands and Ireland, they took military fitness and athleticism very seriously in the Middle Ages and early modern period. We hear about them swimming, being able to swim in an age when probably not many people could.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  We hear about all sorts of rock lifting contests, about tests of strength. One of them, a cloud chieftains, actually had a sort of athletics competition in the fifteen hundreds to see who was good enough to become his bodyguards. So I think you're talking about then actually something that's quite advanced as a form of military selection. Now, I fully admit that perhaps in reality at times it was a case of just who you could rope in from your local lands to be Galloglass. And there's an interesting contrast where the descriptions of some Galloglass are clearly very formidable, well-trained individuals. But then there's also a letter written to Thomas Cromwell, which refers to a Galloglass

• 18:22Speaker 02

  unit having just a few gentlemen and the rest being slaves. Which sounds like a load of local men, perhaps big rural lads, have just been corralled out of the countryside, given a two-handed axe and told they're a Galloglass. So you can see that there's a ranging quality and we'd expect that from any military unit through history, anywhere in the world. But at their best, you can see that there is actually proper training of thought that's gone into this. They're not just relying on primal instinct and animal brute force.

• 18:54Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, and but I guess that selection in itself sets them aside in the sense that they're not just being rounded up like the Cairns would be. And and that, you mentioned that armour adding to their their kind of frame. I think a lot of the the medieval English sources in particular are very fond of painting the Irish Cairns as as they described them as naked. And obviously that conjures up a certain image, but they're talking about the fact that they don't wear huge amounts of armour. So in comparison to someone who is piling on those layers of armour and padded gambassons, that would naturally make you look like a much bigger figure on the battlefield in comparison to those other people who were, in air quotes, naked.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right. Now, that term naked is very interesting because some historians take it a little bit too literally, that they hear about Irish warriors, often specifically Curn being naked. But actually, if you read the English accounts carefully, the English do say that the Irish were, for example, Fawcett talks of the Irish wearing very simple armour. Richard Stannierst talks about Curn not wearing heavy armour. So actually, even with the Curn, yes, their light infantry, but it's a little too dogmatic when historians, which you often read modern historians say this, that Curn never wore armour. Well, I think that's a little bit too sort of definitive and dogmatic, partly because we're talking

• 20:14Speaker 02

  about a big period of history, the late Middle Ages, but also within Ireland, the lordships ranged a lot in wealth, how anglicised they were, how much contact they had with other nations. And so some of these terms like Curn and Gallic glass would have been quite regionally different as well, depending on how easy it was to get equipment shipped in from abroad, or stolen, traded, bartered from the English in and around Dublin. So the Curn we can think of, yes, is very lightly armoured, but I'm sure that the Curn didn't go into pitched battles wearing no armour. That seems very foolish indeed. On the other

• 20:56Speaker 02

  hand, being a reenactor myself, I've experienced what it's like if you do an event, a living history event. I was doing some filming actually, and my living history group, and we were We were operating on a great hillside, which was your classic sort of Celtic landscape, lots of heather, Scots pines. And, you know, even the lightest forms of metal armour was a complete nightmare. So you can see why, if you are a curn who's a raider and mainly a skirmisher, actually, a lot of the time, it was those things like long knives, javelins, and maybe just a little bit of padded armour, that for most of the warfare that was going

• 21:38Speaker 02

  on in Ireland, raiding, counter-raiding, that was actually very useful. And it's interesting, if you've ever, if any of your listeners have ever come across John Derrick's Image of Ireland, which is a late 1500s, published 1581, English book, which is very hostile about Irish culture, but its illustrations are interesting because it shows on a raid, what must be a load of Galloglass, formed up very neatly, accompanying a raid, waiting clearly in the wings, in case a military force turns up to get rid of the raiders. They're formed up nice and neat behind their bagpiper, they've got their two-handed axes, but they don't have any armour on. So clearly, there's also occasions when, I think, anyway,

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Galloglass understood, right, okay, this is where we don't wear the armour. This time, the armour's not going to be useful.

• 22:29Matt Lewis?

  And we need to think sensibly about them adapting, like everybody else, adapting to the circumstances that they're in. You're going into a pitched battle, you might wear your full armour, but if you're conducting a raid that you need to be a bit more nimble for, you might wear a little bit less. And I think quite often, the English idea that Irish fought, with the air quotes again, naked, is just that idea that they felt they were so much more better prepared, better armoured than the Irish were. And it's a sort of derogatory term, isn't it, to talk about their lack of professionalism, perhaps?

• 22:59Speaker 02

  That's right. But also, of course, there's a class prejudice as well, because actually, we hear, there's descriptions of English and Welsh longbowmen, and they're described in very much the same ways that the English describe Irish warriors, which is that lots of the longbowmen are described as being scruffy, brutish, and almost in that sense, naked, by which clearly what really that term naked meant was not much metal armour.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  And actually, probably the reason for that a lot of the time was lack of money.

• 23:31Matt Lewis?

  I was struck when you mentioned that lots of Gaelic were travelling with a couple of attendants and maybe young boys to help them, because you're incredibly close then, and I imagine every single medieval knight would hate me to say this, but they're very close to the idea of a knight with his squires. You have all of this equipment and you need people to help you maintain it and carry it and move it around and maybe even put it on. And there's also that social status of having people around you serving you because you're so important and powerful and wealthy. It sounds like they're behaving an awful lot like medieval knights, although, as I say, lots of knights would probably, from a class point of view, want to say, look, they're nothing like a knight.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  Yes, I think the comparison is interesting because in some ways they are similar, but also the way that it's different is that to be a warrior in Gaelic society was to be something of a gentleman. So the noble status comes from bearing arms. Now, a lot of those cairn, even if they might have looked tatty to the English, they would have considered themselves really somebody and they would have regarded themselves as often of noble blood, because they would have had a much wider, which is a common feature of Gaelic society, a much wider

• 24:53Speaker 02

  idea of clansship and of nobility coming from being able to trace your descent to the chief in some way, or to a chieftain, somebody in a position of prominence. So I think we've got to imagine an Irish army would be that, as I say, however barefoot and dirty after a few days in the field those cairn and Gaelic looked, we've got to imagine that every single one of them probably really felt they were a cut above the mass of peasants toiling in the fields. The other significant difference between Gaelic society, and let's call it mainstream feudal Europe, is that in Gaelic society, there never seems to have been a

• 25:38Speaker 02

  sense that you need to have a title conferred on you by a central authority. So we get a fascinating story about somebody who was real called Fergus of Galway, who was ruler of Galway, and he seems to have behaved, according to the story... By saying that that he is a knight, but he doesn't need anyone to knight him. Also, we we have the same thing in accounts of Irish society, where clearly there's just a sense of it comes from ancestry. And so however, however, poor you might end up, even if you are living in a thatched cabin. If you have that connection to the person who lives in the big house, because they're your sixteenth cousin.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  That's sort of enough to mean you are in your mind, something similar to being a knight. And I think that's a fascinating difference. And one reason for that, of course, is we're talking about Ireland as this is much more decentralized place than England or France. That fragmentation of Ireland was made very much worse by the English invasion at the end of the eleven hundreds. Each of the Irish lordships became its own nation and often with fierce hostilities to their neighbour. So that adds to that sense that that you don't need Dublin or somebody in the capital city to tap you on the shoulder with

• 27:05Speaker 02

  a sword to be something like a knight. And I think that's a fascinating difference.

• 27:09Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it is really interesting. What what does it really mean to be what we would think of as a knight? Is it the fact that someone has tapped you on the shoulders with a sword irrespective of your deserving or your military capacity? Or is it about what you can actually deliver on the battlefield? What is it that makes you a knight? It's a really interesting way to look at that question, isn't it?

• 27:26Speaker 02

  I think as well that somebody like William Marshall, who knew Ireland well. I'm sure actually he would have found a lot of commonalities with an Irish nobleman. There was a very elitist worldview that the Gallic glass leadership, the Gallic glass aristocracy in common with the Irish aristocracy, the Scottish aristocracy. They, you know, they considered themselves important with a right to rule. So that would have been something that somebody like William Marshall or any English knight would have completely understood that. The other thing is, I think that the differences are sometimes deliberately exaggerated in the English accounts. Because to stress difference and how alien and as if Ireland's another world.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  That was a necessary part of the propaganda if you were going to colonize and take over. If you say, oh, the place is pretty similar to ourselves, that's not such a good alibi and such a good motivating force to get people in your army fired up to take over this supposedly primitive area that's going to benefit from your rule. So there's a lot of that that goes on. And I think that probably for your average English serf and your average Irish farmworker, I can't believe life was actually that different. And I think that in many ways also, before the Reformation, a lot of the cultural attitudes and religious attitudes that an English knight had would have been not out of this world

• 28:56Speaker 02

  different to those that an Irish or Scottish aristocrat would have had.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasiapro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  Ever wondered what it feels like to be a gladiator, facing a roaring crowd at potential death in the Colosseum? Find out on the Ancients podcast from History Hit. Twice a week, join me, Tristan Hughes, as I hear exciting new research about people living thousands of years ago, from the Babylonians to the Celts to the Romans, and visit the ancient sites which reveal who and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the Ancients from History Hit.

• 30:37Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I think we definitely probably need to be aware of effectively what is English snobbery, isn't it? When we went to make a film about castles in Ireland, which you can watch on History Hit now if you subscribe, we went and saw kind of Gerald of Wales' manuscript of the topography of Ireland, in which they're so careful to paint the Irish as other, as kind of barbaric, as in need of the intercession of the Anglo-Normans to justify their assault. So there is this desire to paint them as being very different, because that's the reason that you need to go there, to assimilate them, to make them the same as the rest of Christendom.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  That's right, and especially to stress messages like that the Irish don't make productive use of the landscape. And that's something we see through colonial exploits all through history. The idea that you can take the land because effectively it's unoccupied, people aren't making any good use of it. The other thing is that Gerald of Wales and all of those English accounts, the one thing that's interesting about them, though, I really find interesting, is that none of them doubt the physical hardiness and relative health and strength of the Irish people. And I find that very interesting. So they might say all sorts of other critical things, but actually even the most damning English accounts,

• 31:57Speaker 02

  such as that by Edmund Spencer, who in the late 1500s was over in Ireland, he's full of praise for how hardy and how strong the Irish are, and that they'll put up with pretty much any hardship. So it's sort of interesting there, that sometimes actually I think the historians home in on just the really, really negative bits that they find in these accounts, and take them as gospel. Whereas a more careful reading actually allows you to see some of those other aspects, and some of the complexities in those documents. There's also, of course, the fascinating angle to this, which is that... By the time we get to the end of the Middle Ages, Gerald of Wales was already

• 32:42Speaker 02

  part of history. So the one of the most powerful people in Ireland, the Earl of Kildare, had a copy of Gerald of Wales's book in his castle library in Maynouf. Now, I find this fascinating. So actually, we can see that the Irish Lords, at least one of them was also reading this stuff. And that's something also that I've been doing some work into. The libraries that some of these Irish aristocrats seem to have had, we've got some book lists for the Earl of Kildare. And again, we see not a cut-off, primitive, isolated place, but actually, we find a library

• 33:21Speaker 02

  that had works by Thomas More, Utopia, and also, most fascinatingly, I think, probably, given the conversation we're having now, the Roman military theorist, Vajetius, and the late medieval reworking of Vajetius, Christine de Pizan. Now, I have wondered whether there is a bit of a whiff of Vajetian theory in the composition of Irish armies. Irish armies are organised as this sort of tripartite system, three wings, where we have horsemen, light infantry, heavy infantry. Now, there are some similarities there with the way that Vajetius recommends you ought

• 34:06Speaker 02

  to organise a legion. And the idea of having your steady veteran, heavy infantry, the triarii, as Vajetius called them, is actually the same word that William Camden's Latin text, Britannia, uses to describe Gallic glass. Now, this inadvertently, then, the English book Britannia by William Camden, which is telling us how Ireland has no learning and no decent literature in it, it kind of inadvertently prompted me, when I saw this word, using the same Latin word that Vajetius uses for heavy infantry, this prompted me to think, well, I wonder actually if the Irish chiefs,

• 34:51Speaker 02

  specifically the Gallic glass leadership, actually whether they knew their Greco-Roman military theory. And I think they did because Vajetius was was popular across Europe as a source of authority. And there's no reason to think that Ireland or Scotland were any different in that regard.

• 35:10Matt Lewis?

  That's absolutely fascinating. You mentioned a little bit earlier, this idea that the Gaelic from Scotland, Western Scotland, would have considered themselves part of the same kind of Celtic diaspora as the Irish. So they go there and essentially involve themselves in Irish politics, fight with Irish lords and clans. How did they then end up being used by Anglo Norman lords as well? That seems like a little bit of a separation from the way that we've been speaking about them so far.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  I wonder whether we need to stop and think about that term Anglo Norman. In the Middle Ages and the early modern period, they used the word English and they sometimes also talk about Old English, meaning families who were long established in Ireland. Now, what's interesting is a number of the colonizing Anglo Normans, if you like, were actually Welsh Norman. So whether we want to call them Cambro Norman, but we've got a number of them. But the thing is, once in Ireland, a lot of them settle down and they become very much part of the Irish way of life. I think they have to because they're living

• 36:19Speaker 02

  in a frontier manner. And what we find with families like the Keatings, the Purcell's, Butlers, Fitzgeralds, that they really are able to change gear depending on the circumstances so that they will stress how English they are, if it's useful to them, with the English crown in order that they can show their good English subjects. But actually, their day to day lives out in the countryside, really, where they are just, I think, pretty much in all to all intents and purposes, living like an Irish chieftain. So I think we can see, see it's actually quite complicated what we mean by that term Anglo Norman, because it doesn't take them long before they become very much part of an Irish way of life.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  The other thing is that the English don't really want to get that involved for a long time in Irish politics. And there's a feeling that the best way of running Ireland would be a kind of poacher turn gamekeeper, which is to hire some of these people, Gallo Glass and Kern, and that you can use them and that they know the local area and they'll be good at controlling it. So we get McDonnell, Gallo Glass, being hired very close to the English area of interest. And they're given castles and they're given land and they're told, told really that they can have the land if they defend the English interest there. But we can see that in the, in the, in the long run,

• 37:49Speaker 02

  even those families that, that sign up to the English interest in Ireland, which also the Keating family do to supply Kern for the English government in Dublin. Actually, the loyalty is paper thin. And clearly they are taking what is a temporary form of protection of their lands. So they're going to get some sort of protection of land from other English colonizers who might be coming there, redrawing the map of Ireland. So they're getting, they're taking the best offer that's there in front of them. But in the long term, a lot of them join with uprisings such as Hugh O'Neill, Red Hugh O'Donnell, the Earl of Desmond.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  And Machiavelli would have laughed about this, which is that mercenaries are always going to turn on you in the long run. And probably that's true, probably, but I think with the Gallo Glass and the Kern, they were probably always thinking, really, this is the best offer I've got for now. But in the long run, they're hoping for a very different type of society.

• 38:55Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, always dangerous to think someone who you think of as a mercenary is really on your side. They're on your side for as long as it suits them or it's profitable to be on your side.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  Yes, and I think actually, if, you know, when I think of the Galloglass, if I was going to give three words that sum up what they were, I would say Gaelic, Catholic and military. Now, after the Reformation, the sense of difference between the English and the Irish really intensifies. And it means that if you think about those three words, the Galloglass and the Kern, even if they're serving the English and getting good money, good lands for it, the English are not ticking in, they're not ticking those boxes of what they're actually, their, their political priorities are. So really, they've got a strong political agenda

• 39:45Speaker 02

  as well as being sufficiently ruthless that they can change sides as and when it suits them.

• 39:51Matt Lewis?

  The Galloglass will become involved in kind of several key conflicts, particularly the Gaelic Reclamation of Ireland in terms of trying to drive the English out. How key are they in weakening English authority in Ireland?

• 40:05Speaker 02

  They are very important. Hiram Morgan, who's a great Irish historian, I love his definition of a Galloglass, which is they are, if I remember rightly, the heavy infantrymen of the Gaelic revival, which is they really are part of that period of history. So I think, as I say, I think all the evidence suggests that Scottish warriors were always coming and going in Ireland, long before the advent of this thing that we, we more specifically identify as a Galloglass. Now, of course, once they're in Ireland, it means that most of the rank and file become Irishmen. So that the leadership are people of Scottish origin,

• 40:45Speaker 02

  but they are in, they're marrying with Irish ladies and they're recruiting Irishmen. Now, they are a very, very important aspect of the Irish lordships being able to defend themselves and really turn most of the Irish countryside into a kind of no-go zone for concerted English expansion.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  So the Gaelic revival, we could think of really as it's a sort of long-term stalemate, which is the lordships around Ireland are heavily fortified enclaves. And the Gallic glass are sufficiently heavily, heavily equipped that they're able to deal with English cavalry, English knights. And we have accounts of head-on encounters between Gallic glass and between English noblemen, or at least very, very anglicised Anglo-Irish noblemen. And there are occasions where the Gallic glass win, which again leads me to think these are not just people relying on brute force, they're people who very much knew how to fight.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  And I see them as using the axe, which is another thing we should talk about because the Gallic glass axe is the defining emblem of their trade. I see them using those axes again, not really as somebody just swinging it around their head, but as somebody using it much more skillfully. And I'm sure that lots of your subscribers will know of Hans Talhofer, the German medieval fight master. Now, if we look at Talhofer, we can see some moves which I'm sure a Gallic glass would recognise with the pole axe, which is not just relying on the sharp blade to do the chopping, but it's a staff weapon. The whole, the whole of the haft is being used as a weapon.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  It's about being nimble on your feet, about moving, it's about agility. And again, it's one of those things, to go back to what we talked about before, the Highlanders, Irishmen seem to have been relatively healthy by the standards of the day. And I think you would need to be very, very healthy and have a lot of cardiovascular fitness to be able to fight like one of those people we see in Talhofer's pictures who were using a pole axe. Now, all of that, fighting like that, made them a very formidable part of Ireland really just being able to press pause on the English conquest of Ireland for a very long time.

• 43:31Speaker 01

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• 44:05Speaker 03

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• 44:52Matt Lewis?

  The axe, I think, is one of those weapons that you tend to think, when we think of the Middle Ages, particularly the High and Late Middle Ages, you think by then it's an old-fashioned thing. It's a bit of a Viking thing. But most knights knew how to fight with an axe still during this period. There's an account of King Stephen at the Battle of Lincoln using an axe when his sword breaks. And as you say, they're very similar to a polearm, which is the mainstay of the English army throughout the medieval period because they're so versatile. And as you say, you're not just hacking and chopping with the axe head. You're using the whole length of it to defend, to push, to prod, to poke, as well as slashing. So maybe a much more sophisticated weapon than we might just think when we think of a big, two-handed axe.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Definitely, and I think we should also add in there that late medieval literature stresses the importance of wrestling for soldiers as well, partly because it keeps them fit and it's a fairly safe way they can train so that they don't, as Thomas More warned us in Utopia, that some military retainers ended up rather overweight and not very useful. You can imagine that happening if you were letting them sit around and just feast and take all the hospitality that they can lay their hands on. So in the Highlands and Ireland, wrestling was clearly a sport taken very seriously. There were two members

• 46:12Speaker 02

  of the McSweeney family who settled at a succession dispute with a wrestling match. So it was clearly something that had rules and had a judicial nature to it. There was even an international wrestling competition that took place in Scotland when a Highlander had been imprisoned by King James the Fourth, but James was so impressed by this Highlander who beat a visiting Italian wrestler, and so he set the Highlander free. So all of these things, I think you see that the use of weapons, actually, we're talking about people who are very good at unarmed combat and are more than capable of fighting with

• 46:53Speaker 02

  no weapon, but also using the weapon in a way that a lot of modern people wouldn't understand or readily recognise. So it's not just whirling around with the axe and just chopping, but it's using it as a staff weapon to block, it's using it to trip people up. So we've got to think of Gallic glas, in my opinion, as fast-moving warriors. We've got to think of them as a sort of Gaelic samurai, who is very, very fit, very strong, has been selected because they're big and strong, but is also light on their feet. I wonder also if late medieval warfare, armies probably are getting bigger.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  And the wars are getting often longer. Whether this means that the battlefield becomes a more crowded place. So the pitched battle is somewhere you can't just whirl the axe around your head. Because there isn't the space to do it. You need then to be able to fight in a very confined space using every inch of that axe and its pole. Now, the axe itself, I think it's a mistake when people see the Gallo glass axe as being the the sort of last breath of the Viking age. Clearly Vikings liked their two handed weapons. And clearly there were lots of Vikings who settled in Scotland and those areas the Gallo glass came from.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  There's an obvious Scandinavian component there. It's not just something that we press freeze on, they actually continue to develop. And of course, the axe is a very good weapon. If you're trying to in the early modern period, at the end of the Middle Ages, break up blocks of pike men. If you're trying to hack your way through a space that is filled with enemy handgunners. That kind of thing, it's a very intimidating weapon. Um, we can also add to that, the Gallo glass axe heads don't seem to be something that is just time immemorial the same. It's hard to say exactly from the axes that survive, whether they are Gallo glass axes.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  My friend and colleague Cormac Burke, who's a very good Irish historian, doesn't like it when people talk of the axe heads they find in Ireland as just Gallo glass axes. It's better to call them something like Gallo glass type axes. Because clearly other people are using axes too, Kern and so on. But the there seems to be from the artistic representations we have from the surviving axe heads, the later styles are a bit like the blade on a halberd. But a halberd that doesn't have a spearhead or any kind of beak or spike on the back of it. So actually, Gallo glass axes are are moving forward in time.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  They seem to have been made within Ireland and Scotland as a reference to several hundred Gallo glass axes being made within Ireland for them. But as I say, there's something that seems to actually change and develop over time. And I think they change and develop because the Gallo glass have seen the weaponry used by English halberdiers and are thinking they've got to update and update their style of weaponry a bit.

• 50:14Matt Lewis?

  Remember they're not completely disconnected from everything else that's going on in the world around them in political and military terms. They get involved as well in the Scottish, the first Scottish War of Independence, sort of backing Robert the Bruce. How much do you think that is down to the, the old Gaelic connection, the Scottish heritage? And how much is that to do with the fact that actually that helps Irish politics too?

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Yes, well, i- i- it's very frustrating when historians talk of Robert the Bruce and his younger brother Edward as being Anglo Norman. So again, it's that old term Anglo Norman that we need to be very careful about. They obviously had some, some of that as part of their cultural inheritance, but actually through their mother, they were also very Gaelic as well. So the, the Bruce brothers are sort of the perfect rulers for winning people over in Scotland in that they've got a foot in either camp, in that old Norman style of culture, the chivalrous culture and also within the Gaelic culture.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  On the other hand, it's not as if all the Gallo glass families are a huge fan of, of the Bruce brothers. The McSweenes don't like him at all. And it's completely wrong when people see the start of the Scottish War of Independence as just being a clear cut England against Scotland. There's actually competing claims for the Crown of Scotland within Scotland. But there's a wonderful poem that survives where the McSweenes are imagining being able to get their lands back in Scotland, Castle Sween back in Scotland from the Bruce dominated Scotland. And it talks about tall sailors, tall people in their luxury galleys, which

• 52:00Speaker 02

  have got wonderful cabins, and they bring the women with them, and they're going to lead this assault on the castle. So you can imagine, there's a lot of bravado in these people as well. And you can imagine those sort of poems being read at the banquet table. Now, the Bruce brothers understand the power of that kind of narrative, and they also understand that there's an avenue to be explored if they can invade Ireland. So Edward Bruce, younger brother of Robert, he launches a full-scale invasion of Ireland, again showing actually how organised medieval Scottish armies were. A lot of the galleys for it

• 52:41Speaker 02

  are supplied by McDonald's, by McRory's, who are Galloglass families. And this is nothing short of a medieval D-Day, where there's a landing on the Northern Irish coast. And clearly, there is an inspiring message within Edward Bruce's propaganda that he is leading a sort of pan-Celtic invasion, which is going to be driving the Anglo-Irish barons from their lands, and that there's going to be some sort of re-establishment of the high kingship of Ireland. But of course, he's going to be with him at the top. Now, I think, of course, that the reality is that any nobleman, Irish, Anglo-Irish,

• 53:25Speaker 02

  Scottish, they must have been very wary about what was going on, and understood that a lot of these alliances were like the sands in a sand dune that were changing shape all the time. And so there was a lot of changing sides, and watching and waiting and seeing what was happening. But we certainly see how good Scottish, Irish, and Galloglass were during that period of the Bruce invasion, which every one of the battles that we know about in that invasion. Except for the final battle in which Edward Bruce is killed, every other battle the Scottish Irish Army perform extremely well, and it's a very worrying time for the English government.

• 54:07Matt Lewis?

  And Galloglass are present at Bannockburn, I think, as well, aren't they?

• 54:10Speaker 02

  We get Galloglass or people of those families. And again, actually, there's an interesting debate to be had around whether someone who comes from the bloodline of MacSheehy, MacSweeney and so on, whether they are automatically a Galloglass. I'm fascinated by finding examples of where people have those surnames, but they're not following the Galloglass trade. I mentioned there was a MacSweeney who was a clergyman, but also I can find a MacSheehy who by his surname, you would think he must be a Galloglass, but he was a commander of Kern. So again, we need to be careful about thinking these people are really the leadership, are leaders, are barons, and we don't have to think and we shouldn't think of them as someone

• 54:54Speaker 02

  who's a kind of captain of the castle guard, who's standing there doing his shift, guarding the castle gates with a helmet on his head and a two-handed axe. Actually, if you'd met the chief of the MacSweenys, chief of the Macabes, you know, you'd be meeting very much a chieftain with his own court of harpers, bards and all the rest.

• 55:18Matt Lewis?

  Just as we, as we move towards an end, I wondered if you could talk to us a little bit about when the Galloglass begin to disappear and kind of what legacy they leave behind them in Ireland. We kind of remember them now as these kind of legendary immense warriors on the battlefield. But what is their real legacy?

• 55:38Speaker 02

  I think that they seem to decline in quality or are not so good right at the end of the period when they exist. I'm thinking of Barnaby Rich, who was an Englishman who served in Ireland. He's very dismissive of Galloglass and says that they're not very good. And he was probably thinking about what happened when Galloglass were fighting against pikemen and handgunners. And the trouble with the Galloglass is that they were heavy infantry.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  And then there was a missing bit really in the Irish armies because at the other end you had very light infantry with the cairn. And what Irish armies really needed was a sort of medium weight line infantryman. And that's exactly what England did have. England had billmen, longbowmen, later on, pikemen. And that was a more flexible fighting force that England had. England also had better cavalry. The Irish cavalry were very, very brave, very gutsy, but they really were light cavalry. And so you have really a very skirmisher heavy army within an elite of very heavily

• 56:56Speaker 02

  armoured Galloglass. And it's a bit too much an army of extremes. They needed something in between. The Irish chiefs perhaps thought there was a solution in hiring what they call red shanks, which are very large numbers of Highland warriors using the famous two handed swords that people often call claymores. And they, they're sort of somewhere between a Galloglass and a cairn. But it's never going to be as effective hiring people in rather than creating something in, in your own nation. This was really hard for any of the Irish chiefs to do because Ireland was not united around a single figure.

• 57:35Speaker 02

  And so we're really, it actually is extraordinary, the achievement of those Irish military leaders, that they were able to create formidable military forces in what were just regions of the country. So that was a huge problem. They were also undeniably more economically cut off than England was. England had a flourishing maritime trade, a much more diverse economy. The Irish economy was heavily agricultural. And it would put a real strain on that economy, keeping these people, Galloglass and cairn, going. Now, you can look at Gallic Glass in one way and think that their legacy is entirely unpleasant

• 58:19Speaker 02

  because clearly at times they were ruthless, brutal and acted out of a lot of self-interest. But I wonder whether there's also some slightly more interesting sides to them as well. I think there's something very interesting in that idea that they didn't feel they required a knighthood from someone in order to be someone. They clearly were people of big personal presence and they clearly also did value the culture they belonged to. So we can see that their legacy then is actually quite a complicated one. And there's all sorts of subtleties in there that we're missing if we just see them as

• 59:03Speaker 02

  bloodthirsty soldiers of fortune. Something I'm fascinated by is that you do meet people in Ireland, but also Irish districts of Britain like Liverpool, London, parts of Scotland where there's been Irish migration with those old surnames of McDonnell, McSweeney and McSheehy, McCabe and so on. And everything we know suggests that if you have that surname of McSweeney or Sweeney or McCabe, then you do have a Gallic Glass ancestor. So I think that's an extraordinary legacy, that genealogical legacy that's out there

• 59:45Speaker 02

  in the world and can be traced back to these extraordinary fighting men.

• 59:50Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I imagine there might be some McSweenys, some McCabe's listening now who are delighted by the fact that they most likely have some Gallic Glass in their history. That must be incredible. Thank you so much for joining us, Fergus. It's been amazing to get to know these people a little bit better, to peel back the battlefield myth a little bit and look at what's going on all around and beneath that. So thank you so much for joining us.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:00:17Matt Lewis?

  I hope you've enjoyed delving into the world of the legendary Galloglass. You can find out more about Irish medieval history in several of our episodes in our back catalogue. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free. Sign up now at historyhit.com/subscribe. Go on, you know you want to. Anyway, I'd better let you go.

• 1:01:02Matt Lewis?

  I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasiapro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.