High Kings of Ireland

What if “High King” in medieval Ireland was less a fixed office than a fiercely contested prize, won through ritual, lineage, and force? On the Hill of Tara, a would-be ruler climbs toward the Stone of Destiny, hoping for the legendary cry that marks him as chosen. Matt Lewis and Dr Seán Ó Hoireabhárd explore a world of multiple kings, turn-taking dynasties, cattle raiding, and shifting power between church, Norse settlers, and Irish rivals. Along the way, they reveal how Tara, Brian Boru, and the Uí Néill shaped Ireland’s tangled medieval politics. MORE Castles and the Conquest of Ireland Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/castles-and-the-conquest-of-ireland/id1564113746?i=1000673307385 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/4mQSY11BBAru3Q3tDQgXWA A Complete History of Medieval Ireland Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a-complete-history-of-medieval-ireland/id1564113746?i=1000756742956 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/5GsDITifa9a22NEzEBybvi?si=2ybhyspPRviJJlU6cclBXw Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Robin McConnell. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Watch Matt and Eleanor's new documentary The Rise of the Plantagenets on History Hit. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week PLUS early access, ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

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• 1:18Matt 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.

• 2:00Matt Lewis?

  At some point during the 6th century, a lonely figure steps out into the dawn light. He climbs up the windswept slopes of the Hill of Tara. When he reaches the top, he pauses to look out. From this lush, green vantage point, he can see Ireland for miles in every direction. It's a powerful view and an inspiring one for an ambitious man. The top of the hill is not the end of his journey. The hill is really a ridge over a mile long, upon which the raised earthworks of ancient forts undulate. At the centre of these stands the thing he seeks.

• 2:41Matt Lewis?

  Clambering over and down these ridges, almost breathless with the effort and the anticipation of reaching his goal, he finally sees it: a solitary stone, standing proudly upright. Some say it was placed there by the gods. Some call it the Stone of Destiny. The man knows that when he climbs onto the stone, it will react. He's not sure what to expect, but if the stories are true, the stone will emit an unnatural shriek, and the waves of the oceans around Ireland will answer it with a roar. At least, he hopes to hear these sounds, because if he does, then it will mean he is the chosen High King of Ireland.

• 3:25Matt Lewis?

  Many men claimed to be, or were claimed after the fact to have been, the High King of Ireland. But there were frequent, almost constant wars between the Irish kingdoms. Later, they fought the Norse, holed up in the towns founded by Vikings like Dublin and Wexford. In the 12th century, the Norman barons of England and Wales invaded and turned Ireland into a lordship in the Angevin Empire. All of this begs the question: was there ever truly a single ruler of Ireland? Was the High Kingship ever a reality, or merely an ambition?

• 4:05Matt Lewis?

  Today's guest is the perfect person to answer these questions. Dr Shawna Herriwood is a research fellow at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and the author of The Medieval Irish Kings and the English Invasion.

• 4:26Matt Lewis?

  Welcome to Gone Medieval, Shaun. It's fantastic to have you with us.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me on.

• 4:30Matt Lewis?

  I'm really looking forward to this. We can dig into what we know about the High Kings of Ireland. And I guess the point to start at is, when do we start getting a High King of Ireland? Who is the first one and when are they on the throne?

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Well, that's a great question to start with and a tricky one to answer, actually, because the Irish throughout the Middle Ages evolved a notion of the King of Ireland, or High King of Ireland, and we might return to that term in a second, that stretched back to time immemorial. And according to different sources, they might give different exact dates, but roughly speaking, the scheme stretched back to 2000 B.C. And so we would not regard any of the kings listed for the B.C. era, for example, as historical kings, or indeed well into the A.D. era either. We would start to look at kings of Tara, as opposed to kings of Ireland,

• 5:28Speaker 02

  as historical kings, perhaps around the 5th, the 6th centuries A.D. Now, exactly what their power was is another question as well. But the reason for this is that we really only get historical documents from Ireland from the 5th century onwards. So our earliest historical documents actually come from Patrick himself, which is quite appropriate, two documents written by Patrick. And then we have something of a gap in the record until the 7th century. So it's really with the 7th century that we start seeing kings that we would regard as historical. As to whether they were kings of Ireland, that is a question of whether

• 6:13Speaker 02

  and to what extent you believe in what the Eneel dynasty said about themselves. So we can discuss that further, of course.

• 6:19Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, fantastic. So there might well be an element of... These kings later on kind of mythologising their ancestry and trying to root the role of the high king or the king of Ireland in kind of deep history that we should probably take with a pinch of salt, is that fair?

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, absolutely. The point, I suppose, for these medieval kings was to say that they had an ancestry, a prestige that stretched back. In some respects, they did, because the kingship of Tara certainly appears to have been something that existed before Christianity came to Ireland in the prehistoric era. But it is virtually certain that it meant something completely different to what it meant in the historic era, in the early Christian era, however you would like to phrase it. So it's a question of a reinterpretation of the institutions associated with Tara as meaning ipso facto king of Ireland.

• 7:14Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. I mean, later medieval kings of England were great at producing these genealogies that included King Arthur in their ancestry and that stretched all the way back to Adam and Eve at the Garden of Eden. So there's maybe an element of that kind of similar rooting themselves in a deeper history than they're entitled to.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  It's absolutely the same. And from the very earliest documents that we have, what the Irish are concerned with is showing their place in wider Christian and world history. So where do the Irish belong? The Irish are not mentioned in the Bible. It becomes a job for somebody to find out where the Irish fit in. And so they fit themselves into the genealogical scheme with Japhet, son of Noah. And this is the person to whom they traced their descent. And they evolved a legend of Ireland, a pseudo-history of Ireland, which involved a series of invasions by different peoples, the Furbulg, the Tuatha de Danann and so on, and different

• 8:14Speaker 02

  people who give their names to different important places in Ireland or explained different traditions from around Ireland. And so little by little evolved this scheme, fit this scheme into sort of a chronological framework, and, as you say, lent prestige to the historical kings by so doing.

• 8:33Matt Lewis?

  And you mentioned a couple of times there that the king of Tara is maybe something... It's sort of interesting from this period too, and there is the Hill of Tara, where there's the Irish kind of Stone of Destiny. Can you tell us a little bit about the significance of both the Hill of Tara and the Stone of Destiny, the kind of speaking stone that's there?

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah, so I mentioned the King of Tara. Tara is an actual place, it is in County Meath, which is just north of Dublin for anyone who may not be familiar. And it is this place, Tara, which has these prestigious associations. Now, there are physical monuments at Tara which go back to the Neolithic period and also finds from the Bronze Age period as well. Whether it was in continuous use is open to question, but it remained important and remained well-known to the Irish throughout a long period. The idea has been, I think, among people who deal with prehistory, that there was a kind of sacral kingship associated with Tara

• 9:37Speaker 02

  in the period before the coming of Christianity to Ireland. And so that it had some sort of cultic or religious significance, and that this was what was later levied by the Eneel dynasty into a kind of a new Christian kingship of Ireland. So the associations of the actual place, in terms of there are a number of different monuments added, some are older, some are younger. One of them, as you say, is the Leo Fall, the Stone of Destiny. Of course, the one that is there today does not have the only claim to be the historic medieval Leo Fall. But at any rate, the idea was that when the true king of Tara would touch the stone,

• 10:19Speaker 02

  the stone would shout aloud, would cry out, would indicate that the true king was present. This is linked to a medieval Irish conception of the ruler's truth, fear flathavon, so that the proper king, the true king, would be known by his actions. So he would never give, for example, a false judgment. And a king who was found to have given a false judgment must be a usurper and he would lose his position. In early Irish literature, this is a recurring theme. So, yeah, so Tara remained conceptually important to people across the island because of its history and because of perhaps its pre-Christian significance, even as its role changed and it became something entirely different.

• 11:03Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I was fortunate enough to go a couple of years ago to do some filming over in Ireland. We did some documentaries about Irish castles. We went to the hill of Tara to talk about Ireland kind of before the Normans had arrived. It's an absolutely spectacular place, isn't it? We stand on the top of there, you feel like you can see the whole of Ireland from up there. And for what it's worth, I did touch the Lea Fail and it didn't shout out loud. So sadly, apparently I'm not the true king of Ireland.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Bad luck, maybe next time. Yeah, it's remarkable, I suppose, that area, the Boyne Valley, the River Boyne, the valley that surrounds it, was probably among the earliest to be settled. And it has some incredibly rich farmland and many of our important Stone Age monuments in Ireland are found in that area, including not only, say, the mound of the hostages at Tara, but also people may be familiar with Newgrange or Nouth, which are large Neolithic passage tombs as well, which are also found in that area. So to some extent, its glory is in its past at all times.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  But as you said, there is a remarkable vista at Tara, even though you don't feel like you have climbed a huge amount to get up to it. The surrounding landscape is quite flat. And also in some of the stories that are told about Tara, one for instance, about how it gets its name, is that the earliest Melitian king is a man called Eramon and his wife is, in a story of the Dinhenkis, is supposed to have come from Thebes and she is homesick for Thebes and she's going to return to Thebes. And Eramon, to get her to stay, promises her the loveliest hill in Ireland for herself.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  And so she chooses Tara and Tara takes its name, it's etymologized as Thebenwall in this theory. It was partly on account of its vista that it gained its fame, I suppose, as well.

• 13:01Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, fascinating. And are there any other kind of ceremonial duties or anything like that that are associated alongside the coronation at Tara and the speaking stone, the Stone of Destiny? Are there any other responsibilities that we have a sense of for the High King of Ireland that they should be performing?

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Well, again, for the moment, I'm just confining myself to the King of Tara as opposed to the High King of Ireland and what the link between them might be. It is very much understood as a role where the fertility of the earth and the prosperous-ness of the people, the prosperity of the people, will result from the proper king from being installed. And as I say, the king is associated with justice as well, so the administration of justice. So, yes, there are certain institutions that are associated with it. One, for instance, is the Fesh Téir, the Feast of Tara, which probably took place once in a king's reign, at the outset of his reign, and is a sort of a symbolic marriage between the king and

• 13:59Speaker 02

  the land, so that the land will be prosperous. And then there is the Enoch Thaltin, or affair of Thaltu, which more recently has been argued to be a more local affair than was previously thought. It was previously, in the era of nationalist historians, the early 20th century, thought to be a national affair, but more recently it's been argued to be more local. But at any rate, it was held by the King of Tara in the environs of Tara, Tell Town, County Neath, and would have comprised people travelling from distances to be there for various assemblies. So there were, yes, different institutions associated with the

• 14:38Speaker 02

  kingship of Tara, different roles, but sometimes the exact detail of what happened, especially in the early medieval period, is a little bit elusive.

• 14:49Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And given how rooted lots of those ceremonies and Tara, Tara's a place, is in kind of pre-Christian history of Ireland, do we see the church having any kind of influence on the role, the position, the ways in which kings are being crowned? Are they willing to play alongside this kind of more pagan, pre-Christian sort of ideology? Or are they looking to wipe some of that away when Christianity arrives?

• 15:21Speaker 02

  It's a little bit of both. They're recognizing it. So even from the 7th century, and one of the biographers of Patrick is a man called Murcho, and he describes the King Rannatara, a man called Dermot MacCurville, as totius scotia regnatorum. So ruler of all the Scots, meaning in this case, the Irish, as your listeners will know, perhaps from a recent previous episode. So they're recognizing Tara, they're putting it forward as something important. He also describes it as, you know, the capital of the barbarians in another passage, I think, recognizing in this case its pagan associations. And then you can

• 16:02Speaker 02

  take somebody like Dovnan of Iona, who is the biographer of Columcille, who likewise is sort of advancing the importance of Tara. It would have suited the Church, I think, to have a single king of all Ireland. It would be the logical corollary to, you know, to the Church's system, you know, with the primate. And so, yeah, we see the Church giving a sort of tacit acknowledgement to Tara, at the same time wanting to change its role and advance it. And I mean, even in, say, the early patrician documents, there's, they have to acknowledge that Lugga MacNeil, who was the King of Ireland when, or King

• 16:43Speaker 02

  of Tara, when Patrick comes to Ireland, they acknowledge that he didn't convert to Christianity. So on some level, this is an acknowledgement of early difficulties, perhaps, in the spread of Christianity, or the conversion of Tara. Certainly, Dermot MacCurville appears to be the last king of Tara who celebrated the fes chevr. And the conclusion historians have drawn from this is that it was set aside at that time as a sort of relic of the pagan past. But that would be in the mid 6th century. So perhaps not until the mid 6th century did Tara and the kings of Tara set aside some of the pagan associations of their, of their role.

• 17:25Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I'd like to talk a little bit more about the the structure more widely across Ireland, because it's interesting, isn't it, that the Christian Church tends during this period to be looking for a really top-down conversion. They're looking for the top man to convert on the basis that he will then do the rest of the work. And it sounds like that might have been a bit tricky for them in Ireland, in that there isn't necessarily one top man. And the idea that we have of a High King of Ireland implies that there are other kings, that there are kind of sub-rulers all around Ireland. So what was the the political structure of Ireland like? How many kingdoms were there in Ireland?

• 17:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's another, that's another great question, right?

• 18:03Matt Lewis?

  I'm only here to ask you the difficult questions.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  I know, yeah, I see that. So the first thing to understand really is this was really best described by a Anglo-Norman poem, okay, called the, well, recently renamed The Deeds of the Normans in Ireland. In the past, it was known as The Song of Dermot and the Earl, where it said that in Ireland, kings were as numerous as earls were elsewhere. I mean, but this is exactly the point. The people who elsewhere would have been earls or dukes or barons, all retained the royal title in Ireland. That does not mean that they were all understood to be of equal status, right? So Irish kingship was hierarchical, a king and an over king and a provincial king and potentially a king of Ireland over all of

• 18:49Speaker 02

  them, at least according to the theory. And so for the Irish, it was simple. They understood who the important kings were. But for an outsider looking in, it was very difficult to know. And actually, a very similar thing happened with bishops, so that the Irish were ordaining more bishops seemingly than they were supposed to. But they they knew which were the bishops that were of equal rank with the bishops elsewhere, and which were the ones who weren't. It made Ireland very confusing to outsiders, and it was part of the reason why the Gregorian reform movement in the 11th to 12th centuries tried to reorganise the diocese. And leaving aside the church, in terms of the kings, the interesting thing,

• 19:30Speaker 02

  I would say, is that the kings who were higher up did not try and restrict the use of the royal title. They were happy for their underlings to use the royal title as well. On the idea of this use of the word High King. Meaning the man at the top. This is a nearly modern conceit. It's popularised by a man called Geoffrey Keating, who writes a history of Ireland in the 16th century. High King, ardraí in Irish, is a term that's used in the Middle Ages, but it's used generally as an honorific for kings at lots of different levels. The term that's used in Ireland for the man at the top, most consistently, is simply reairant, King of Ireland. But again, it's a case that the Irish knew what that meant, and perhaps others didn't.

• 20:15Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. It's such an interesting conflict, isn't it, that clearly people are arriving there thinking, right, we're going to do what we've done in every other country, we're going to find the king, we're going to Christianise him, and it'll filter all its way through. They get to Ireland and they find a completely different political structure that they're really struggling to get their heads around, kind of, you know, being a bit glib, but, you know, everyone's a king. You know, you go down the street and you find another king, and it must have been confusing and difficult for them. And I suppose then the idea of a high king begins to appeal to people from beyond Ireland, because they want to know who is in charge of this whole place.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's definitely, that's definitely part of it. I think Patrick himself refers to difficulties he's had with sons of kings. He doesn't refer to himself to a King of Ireland. I think the idea of a King of Ireland is not, I would say, current at his time. In the 6th century, there is no, there is no top man, as you say, for him to go to and Christianise. And then, again, as you said, the later versions of his life by Murcho and Tirchon are placing emphasis on the idea of a conversion of Luggada Mac Neill, which simply, simply wasn't the case. So, yes, under the influence of Christianity, both

• 21:31Speaker 02

  inside and outside Ireland, the notion of a King of Ireland was popularised and advanced. Ireland is quite a modest-sized island anyway, and it's not that unlikely that an idea would strike one of the more powerful kings, that, you know, he could rule over the whole island if, you know, if things fell into his hands.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  The early medieval period, like say, Donach O Corán have argued that in the sort of seventh to ninth centuries, there maybe were ten over kingdoms of real significance on the island, which are contesting power with one another. By the period that I primarily deal with, the Central Middle Ages and the, you know, especially the 12th century, there are only three kingdoms of any real significance. And they contest the position of King of Ireland with one another. So what it means for them is that whichever of the three of them is able to enforce the submission of the other two. He regards himself as the King of Ireland, he styles himself as the King of Ireland. Sometimes even without having established that completely, he regards himself as the

• 22:39Speaker 02

  King of Ireland, a styled King of Ireland. And in some cases is addressed as King of Ireland by people outside of Ireland, including Pope Gregory VII, for example, and the two of the Archbishop of Armagh, and Salomon Landfrank. And we know that Henry I received communication from a person he called King of Ireland, also probably Tirdeloch Hunkover. So, yeah, it gains acceptance. It's something that people want to understand. It's simpler to understand that there is a guy at the top, but also it's a natural development. Given the success of the Church ultimately, obviously, you're making the point that the Church faced difficulties in the early going because of this political setup, but ultimately

• 23:21Speaker 02

  the success of the Church does play into this development of a notion of a King of All Ireland.

• 23:26Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. Which I guess isn't dissimilar to what we're seeing in other emerging kind of nations around Europe either. You know, France is only just beginning to emerge from this collection of small kingdoms and dukedoms and things like that. And the King of France is trying to centralise some power. In England, you've got, you know, the Heptarchy is becoming one kingdom, and then the King of England is trying to impose himself on the rest of Britain as a kind of overlord of Scotland and everything else. It's something similar going on in Ireland.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. The effective polity, or what I would call the effective polity generally, is the provincial king, meaning that there are always provincial kings contesting with one another. Sometimes there is a King of Ireland, who is a clearly dominant figure among them, but he's always primarily King of his province first. So the King of Ireland does not become detached from a province, it does not become a hereditary kingship. And it's one thing that, you know, Gerald Wills, Geraldus Cimbrenses remarks on in relation to the Kings of Ireland. He says that they did not become kings, you know, by any hereditary right or by any right of coronation, but rather by force of arms. So each became king in his own way and lasted as long as he was able to enforce that, right?

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Also mentioned in early Irish law, the king of Ireland, you know, his jew is measured by his fists. So in other words, as much as he's able to take. So this was regarded as a proper way to operate. The Irish undoubtedly were aware that it worked differently elsewhere, that hereditary kingships were emerging. But I suppose it's important to note as well that Irish kingship generally was elective, so that even the provincial kings, for example, were elected to their position by eligible kindreds. And so perhaps it was felt to be analogous that the king of Ireland should be elected to his position by reason of his power and acknowledgement of his peers effectively in the other powerful provinces.

• 25:24Matt Lewis?

  Does that elective element of kingship imply that kings could also be kind of deposed by their own subjects? Is that possible?

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And they were, and they were. Sometimes they suffered temporary depositions, where they would go into a sort of voluntary exile for a period and then we would find them a year or two later returning and reprising their kingship. Other times they would be permanently ousted, either killed or in some instances castrated and blinded by their kinsfolk. This is, I think it's relatively well known that this was a practice in medieval Ireland also and in some other countries like Wales. But it was generally one that was for in-house business, as in your own family were the ones likely to carry this out, not for, not something that was generally done to enemies in other

• 26:12Speaker 02

  kingdoms or other provinces. This was something to disqualify somebody who was eligible for the job in your own kingdom. And so, yes.

• 26:22Matt Lewis?

  It kind of plays into that idea in the medieval mind that kings have to be physically perfect. So if you're blinded or castrated or whatever else, you're now physically imperfect and not eligible for kingship.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So there's this interesting story about one of the kings of Tara, a man called Congol Keir. Interestingly, one of the kings who supposedly didn't belong to the Eneel dynasty. But in any case, Congol Keir was king of Tara, and the story goes that he was stung in the eye by a bee and lost a sight in one eye. And because he was physically blemished, he could not be king, and so had to step down from his role as king of Tara. Now, we know of other kings, like, say, Tyrrh Tigranor O'Rourke, who was king of Breffni at the time of the English invasion, who was described by Geraldo as monocular, so one-eyed. So in practice, this probably was less important. But as part of the theory of kingship, certainly, you should be unblemished. And of course, the

• 27:18Speaker 02

  idea of castration, of course, is that there should be no dynasty to follow after them to avenge them or to, you know, to look back to them as the progenitor of their dynasty.

• 27:43Speaker 01

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• 29:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the Eneel name is one that's cropped up a few times there. And lots of the names of the kingdoms and the dynasties are kind of family names. So how important was the family to the political structure of Ireland?

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Oh, it's absolutely integral. So the way it works is that you, at these different levels of kingship, before you could accede even to the most minor level of king, you had to first be head of your kindred. The Kenfinn is the name of the head of a kindred. So among the heads of the various kindreds, they would elect a king of a tuatha. And among the tuatha that were grouped together, they would perhaps elect an over king to act for them in a collective, and then a provincial king, and so on. So one had to be head of kindred as a basic, you know, building block of the political hierarchy. This is why you can't get queens in medieval Ireland, queens regnant, that is, because women did not have

• 30:06Speaker 02

  the legal capacity either to act for themselves or for anyone else. And so they could not be elected head of the kindred. Therefore, they could not ever rule in their own right. So the various dynasties, well...

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Identity is marked by a patronymic in medieval Ireland. So it's either mach or o, basically. So son or grandson of. And then in addition to these patronymics, the various broader groups would look to an ancestor somewhat further back in the genealogical corpus as a common ancestor of the wider groups. The further back you go, the wider the group. And so the kingdoms themselves took their names in many instances from an ancestor way back in the prehistoric era. Connacht, for example, taking its name from Concad Khacon of the Hundred Battles. And the Eneil tracing themselves to Neil Nagiloch, Nile of the Nine Hostages, whom I've mentioned, I think, already as the

• 31:01Speaker 02

  father of Lugurum McNeil, who was the king of Tara when Patrick came, according to the story. So kindred is absolutely fundamental to the Irish political system. At the same time, this is something different from a tribe. And this is one of the great controversies of early Irish history, that some people insist on using the word tribe. Even though the aristocracy understood themselves to be linked and to have ties of kinship, they were not the only ones who lived in these communities. These communities were populated by lots of strangers, lots of other people who were not related. And they were kingdoms.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  And the fact that kingdoms were led by royal dynasties is not something that we should be surprised by. That's the case everywhere.

• 31:51Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. So once a king has been elected and put in post, we quite often hear stories of them going on cattle raiding as almost like the first thing that they do at the beginning of their kingship. Why is that kind of an important function? What is that doing?

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the craic rige, yeah. So they establish themselves by making an attack early on in the reign. Now, in relation to cattle raiding, I suppose probably important point to make is that the economy of medieval Ireland is based on cattle. But not only the economy, the whole system of clientship. So

• 32:28Speaker 02

  You know, what we would describe as traditionally describe as feudal Europe. The idea is that you would give a parcel of land to a vassal and he would farm it for you and you would receive a rent and food render. But in Ireland, it wasn't a parcel of land you received, but capital in the form of cattle. And so you farmed the cattle and the lord took his food rents and his rent for that. And so the whole system is based around cattle. And so your your wealth as a lord is tied up in livestock. And so if you are, if you're not feeling so flush, the opportunity to add to your bank balance is potentially to to lead an attack on the on your neighbours.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  And it also creates a number of other dynamics, which is that diseases of livestock, for example, are particularly damaging in Ireland as a consequence of the way that this system operated.

• 33:24Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And presumably that also is a way for new kings in particular to position themselves as as more powerful than their rivals. We've talked about, you know, the idea that right at the very top, the what we might think of as the high king is actually just the most prominent or most powerful king amongst the the significant rulers of Ireland. Is there a bit of that going on as well at the lower levels, that these people are kind of jockeying for position to try and understand who is regionally the most important?

• 33:51Speaker 02

  The borders tend to be pretty stable between the kingdoms, but you do get some amount of warfare between the under kingdoms as well as between the over kingdoms. It can sometimes be difficult to tell from the sources to what extent this is endorsed by higher ups and to what extent this is independent action. The sources we have for these conflicts and for, you know, the bulk of of what I'm talking about today are the Irish annals, which are incredibly rich source. But one of the things that's important to understand about them is that they are brief descriptions, headlines of events that happened, you know, so and so led an attack on such another person or such another community.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  That's it. And we often have to draw the link between different events ourselves. So it can be difficult to say what one group was trying to achieve when they attacked another, whether it was genuinely small scale raiding or whether it was linked to a broader conflict between provinces. Probably it was the former in some instances and the latter in others. But it's difficult again for us to be sure at this remove.

• 35:00Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. We've talked about the effect that the arrival of the church had on Ireland and Irish politics. What effect should we see the arrival of Norsemen coming to Ireland? They will have a significant impact during this period. What effect do they have on Irish politics? Do they cause everybody to come together in opposition to the Norse? Or is it more complicated than that?

• 35:24Speaker 02

  Certainly more complicated than that. The settlement pattern of the Norse in Ireland is strange. They don't settle in the countryside, shall we say. They don't establish a wide hinterland for themselves. They settle in small coastal urban communities. And the cities of Ireland today are nearly all the results of Norse settlements. So Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, possibly Cork, Limerick. These are all the result of Viking settlement. Now, the positioning of some of these towns is interesting. They tended to be on the borders of Irish provincial kingdoms.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  So Dublin is just to the south of the Kingdom of Meath, which is the kingdom in which Tara was situated, the most important kingdom of the time. And there was also another Viking settlement on the northern border of that kingdom at a place called Lindurch. It just so happens that that town was destroyed. By Irish attacks. So it's quite possible the Vikings, the Norse, that they were considering making a play for the Kingdom of Ireland and were perhaps hoping to take Tara and do it in that way. If so, they were ultimately unsuccessful in doing that. But also, at the same time, the Irish were unsuccessful in their attempts to oust the Norse. And

• 36:50Speaker 02

  so around the turn of the 10th century, 902, there's a major effort is made by the Eneel to expel the Dubliners. And they expelled the leadership temporarily until 917, when they make a return. And while they're in charge of Dublin, the kings of Meath, you know, levy a tax on it. And, you know, so they're trying to get rich, basically. And there's no doubt that the trade networks that the Norse had established brought significant wealth into Ireland, as well as taking significant wealth out of it in terms of the raids on churches and also the slave trade that they evolved themselves in. So with time, you

• 37:30Speaker 02

  see a sort of enmeshment of the Norse in Irish politics, in the sense that they start appearing on both sides of a given conflict, and Irish start appearing on both sides of their conflicts. So you get various Norse parties fighting with each other. So by no means is it as simple as saying that it's one ethnicity against another. Now, one important saga tale, or history, if you will, is called Cuggagail Regal of the War of the Irish with the Foreigner. It's about the career of Brian Barrow, king, which maybe some listeners might be familiar with. And it tries to present the story as exactly the opposite. It tries to tell the tale of the heroic Christian Irish king Brian, who

• 38:15Speaker 02

  stood up against the pagan barbarian Viking Norse who were attempting to take Ireland and who drove them out of Ireland. And that was, no doubt, popular throughout the 11th century. In the version that we have it, it's probably early 12th century in date.

• 38:32Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. I'm going to come on to Brian Barrow in a second. But by the kind of the 10th century, we see the high kingship, such as it was, being dominated by the Eneels. And what does that tell us about succession? Because we've talked about the idea that it's not really hereditary, but we do see the Eneels beginning to dominate the kingship by this point. Is it becoming hereditary?

• 38:53Speaker 02

  Sort of theoretically, the eligibility, it seems, from the fact I've mentioned Kungal Céil, one or two others who don't seem to have been from the Eneil and in the early historic or maybe even the prehistoric period had been installed as kings of Tara. But with the dawn of the historical period, the Eneil start dominating this office. And what the Eneil do is they alternate their major dynasties in the position of King of Tara. So the two most important, I mean, I don't want to overburden everyone with names of Gaelic dynasties because they are plentiful, but the most important dynasty in the Northern Eneil is called the Kennel Núin, and they give their name to County Tyrone today, right?

• 39:37Speaker 02

  And the most important dynasty in the Southern Eneil is the Clan Cholmán. And these two dynasties, for the most part, alternate the kingship of Tara between them. So it's not quite hereditary, but both of these dynasties do acknowledge a common ancestry and they just swap over and back. And not to complicate it too much, but there are other slightly more regional Eneil dynasties who get their turn occasionally as well. And so it's branches of the Eneil that are alternating it amongst themselves, rather than it being open to any broader network of dynasties. And so the Eneil are very much advancing the idea from the seventh century on that

• 40:20Speaker 02

  to be King of Tara is to be ipso facto King of Ireland.

• 40:24Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, that that kind of makes it sound quite amicable, doesn't it, that everyone's just passing this kingship around between themselves? I'd imagine it's not quite friendly, maybe.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  No, probably not. Probably in practice, there are people who didn't like to wait their turn or to queue, and there are interruptions to the scheme as well. But there is a notion of what they call shailadacht in Irish or turn-taking. And it is advanced as a proposition by other dynasties at different times, who clearly are looking to the Tara model as something to be copied. So for instance, in Munster in the 12th century, there's a conflict between the McCarthy dynasty and the O'Briens, the O'Briens descending from, O'Brien descending from Brian Boru, McCarthy descending from the O'Nacht, a tradition who are prestigious in the early medieval period. And one particular document puts forward this idea that, oh, These two dynasties have always shared the kingship of Munster.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  So in other words, this should be the system going forward. Of course, this wasn't the case, but it was a proposition for the future that there should be turn taking. So yeah, no doubt there were some people who didn't await their turn. And there are documented cases where one dynasty tried to defy the other during their turn. But you can see that the scheme broadly operated for a few hundred years.

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• 43:20Matt Lewis?

  Fascinating, there's a kind of cultural preference for taking turn. It's really interesting the way you're doing it. And I'm going to come back to Brienne Barrow now because obviously if people have heard of A High King of Ireland, they've probably heard of Brienne Barrow.

• 43:34Matt Lewis?

  And in the annals, he's described as the Augustus over all North West Europe. And is that kind of us getting our first indication that within Ireland, they're now identifying this kind of top rank of kingship more clearly?

• 43:46Speaker 02

  Possibly. I think in various obituaries in the annals, there is an attempt always to give the most exalted view possible of a given king and to do full justice to his achievements. So perhaps what this represents, this grandiose title that he receives, what I would suggest that it represents is feeling that simply calling him King of Ireland would not do justice to what he had achieved. So he had achieved something more than what many of the kings of Ireland who had preceded him had achieved. And certainly, you know, he was indefatigable. He campaigned year after year. There are other titles that are used for him as well. He's described as Imperator Scotorum in the Book of Armagh, which is, which is interesting.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  There have been various arguments made on the basis of this title, one of which, for instance, that Imperator in the sense of he had overlordship of the Norse as well as the Gaelic Irish. Another that perhaps he was intending on extending his control beyond the Irish Sea and into the Gaelic peoples of Scotland as well and the Isles. So he might have meant different things by this. Certainly, he was acknowledged as having done something completely different. He broke the nail hegemony and he created a totally different dynamic that prevailed after. So he was very important.

• 45:03Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. You talked about the idea that he's been positioned as someone who was a Christian king who was driving out the pagan Norse. How successful is he in that? You know, what happens to Brienne in the end?

• 45:15Speaker 02

  In the late 10th and early 11th century, the Norse suffered a number of major defeats, of which the Battle of Clontarf, which is Brian's finest hour, is only one. I mean, they also lost a notable battle to the King of Meath, Mael Shachnul Macdonal, who was Brian's great rival of the time. I suppose, if for anyone who's not familiar with the traditional story, the story of Brian's triumph really comes at the Battle of Clontarf, a battle that's fought on Easter Sunday, 10th, 14th, where he faces the Norse down and after a battle of a full day, they are defeated and flee into the sea. And it's a pyrrhic victory, however, as both Brian himself

• 45:58Speaker 02

  and his son, an air presumptive, are killed in the course of the day. And Brian is buried at Armagh, interestingly. He had chosen to back the Church of Armagh, its claim for primacy over the Irish Church. He didn't, for example, he could have advanced Cashel, which was in his own territory as a rival. He didn't choose to do that. He chose to back Armagh and he's buried there. That's an aside. His achievement in defeating the Norse, I think, might have been symptomatic of a Norse decline which was already happening anyway. But thereafter, the Norse in Ireland are not an independent political force. And what happens after Brian's time is that the provincial kings

• 46:43Speaker 02

  in several of the kingdoms move into the Norse towns and use them as capitals. And so Brian's own patrimony is dolgosh, which is effectively same as County Clare today. But the kings of that area, Brian's descendants, they move into Limerick. And likewise, the McCarthy kings move into Cork. And Dublin becomes a prize then, which is disputed by the three over kingdoms, the three hegemon's of the 12th century that I mentioned earlier on. And because of that, there's some sense, a growing sense, that it might be seen as a de facto capital of some sort. So whichever is the most powerful king, he's the one who controls Dublin perhaps.

• 47:24Matt Lewis?

  So almost the Irish don't really live in towns and cities until the arrival of the Norse. But once they get hold of those, that one city in Dublin comes to represent. Almost the power of the High Kings. If you can take Dublin, then you're obviously the most powerful king in Ireland at the time and you become the High King.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's interesting as well as a changing times for Tara. Because Dublin is on Tara's doorstep and so if Dublin has now been regarded as important, it's almost assured that Tara doesn't have the same role that it used to. I mean, that's absolutely true. The Kings of Meath had declined by this point. They were very minor players. They weren't contesting the hegemony of all Ireland anymore with the major players. However, one of the hegemon's, Connacht, repeatedly made emphasis to Meath's traditional associations with the Kingship of Ireland and held the Inach Tholton, for example. So reinstituted that after it had been in abeyance for many years. And a number of poems from Connacht in this era are placing

• 48:26Speaker 02

  emphasis on Tara and its importance, its traditional associations with the Kingship of Ireland. So there's an acknowledgement of that. At the same time, that simply would not be happening if the Kings of Meath were players in the 12th century. So it's reflective of their decline in some respects as well. And the other side of the kings centralising in these towns is that when the English or Anglo-Normans arrived in Ireland, they had very clear targets. And you will see in the early course of the invasion, that the very first places that were taken were Wexford, Waterford and Dublin. So they become the footholds for the English in Ireland as a result.

• 49:04Matt Lewis?

  So that move almost begins to work against the Irish when the Anglo-Normans arrive. And I guess we should get to this point because the second half of the 12th century, Henry II in England, in no small part, I guess, because of what's happened with Thomas Becket, he's keen to go and show the Pope that he can bring Roman Christianity to Ireland to bring it into line with the Roman Church. But there is also the political conquest and the land taking of the Normans coming over to Ireland. What does this mean for all of the Kings of Ireland, but particularly the High King? Are we seeing the decline and the end of the office of High King?

• 49:41Speaker 02

  The kings of Ireland had been pursuing the reform agenda for around a century already in the Anglo-Normans' come, and so it really is leaned into by Turtel Vachavrin, his son, Murchardachavrin, and they, as I mentioned a little bit earlier on, are responsible for the synods at which the dioceses are reformed, get the first native papal legates in Ireland in their time as well. What causes a bit of disruption is that Munster is the leading kingdom in Ireland in their day. After Murchardachavrin falls ill, they are superseded by the Kingdom of Connacht, and the kings of Connacht in the 12th century are not as enthused by the reform agenda

• 50:26Speaker 02

  as some of the other kings. And consequently, reform stalls a little in their era, and so, for instance, the Augustinians and the Cistercians make very little headway in Connacht during their period, so the new orders that were introduced into Ireland. Also, the kings of Connacht wanted an archdiocese of their own, which they had not been awarded when the kings of Munster were in charge, naturally. And so this was vexing for the church to some extent, that they had just come up with a new system for Ireland, and now they were going to have to tear it up and start again. And then additionally, one of the things that the reformers wanted to sort out was Irish marriage practices.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  And if there were any kings who were egregious in their marriage practices at the time, it was the kings of Connacht, because Turtel Vachachunkavir had six wives, and at least six wives, I should say, six we know of, and at least 22 sons by them. And likewise, his son Rory, who was the king of Ireland when the English invasion took place, he also had at least six wives and numerous sons and daughters by them as well. And so, when the invasion takes place, the Irish church backs the invasion under the papal legate of the time, Gillicrist Uchunarka.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  There's a sense, I think, that had a different province been the leading province of the time, had it been a province like Munster, or even like the Northern Neale, who had established their pro-reform credentials, it might have worked out differently, especially with Henry II being an excommunicate at the time. But the Irish Church did choose to back the invasion, and so Pope Alexander was presented with a fait accompli, and so he acknowledged it in the same language, no doubt, that it was presented to him. So, yeah, the course of events in terms of the different provinces taking control, and also their approach to the reform agenda, definitely plays a key role in terms of how the English invasion played out in its early stages.

• 52:30Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. And is there someone that we can consider to be the last High King of Ireland?

• 52:35Speaker 02

  I suppose you would say, yeah, you would say Rury O'Conkover. He's the last Irish King of Ireland. It's worth noting as well that in the 14th century, Edward Bruce's brother Robert comes to Ireland and is inaugurated King of Ireland, you know, among his allies in the north of Ireland, shortly after he arrives in 1315. And so you could potentially make a case for him as well. But the kingship of Ireland, the Kingdom of Ireland is understood to be vested in the English crown, really, after the events of the late 12th century. And Rury effectively goes back to being, I mean, with the Treaty of Windsor in 1175, he's acknowledged by Henry as being still the supreme Irish king, having a sort of

• 53:20Speaker 02

  theoretical overlordship over the Irish kingdoms that had not, at that point, been conquered by the English. But that's a system, that's a, that's a system that breaks down shortly after. And Rury is deposed by his son in 1183. So going back to a point we made previously about elective kingship and being deposed by one's family, Rury is deposed in 1183, and he makes a number of attempted comebacks, but ends up quite a tragic figure by the end of his life. He's going from place to place, looking for support and not receiving any. And eventually, the people in Congress send for him to come back and placate him with a small parcel of land. So he's not even considered a threat for the provincial kingship at that time.

• 54:05Matt Lewis?

  I mean, this has been absolutely fascinating, Sean. It feels like we're only scratching the surface of this really, really complex picture that was as difficult to the people arriving in Ireland, either to Christianise it or to try to conquer it, as it might feel for us trying to explore it today. I wonder if we could end by thinking about, what do you think the term High King of Ireland actually meant to the Gaelic people of the medieval era? Did it mean anything? Is it something that we should consider being almost imposed from the outside? Or was it something that they would have recognised themselves as well?

• 54:38Speaker 02

  I mean, as I say, I mean, the term they used themselves as King of Ireland, and it certainly is recognised. It's not, it's not something that's imposed from outside. It's something that they have established themselves. In terms of what it actually means to them, or what it actually meant to them as opposed to what it means to us, there might be, there might be some gaps in terms of how it was defined exactly, because we find different definitions prevailing at different times. So we've mentioned a good few times, the Inail made the argument that to hold the kingship of Tara is to be King of Ireland. But then other definitions were advanced at different times. So for instance, Mercutio Gabrin advanced the idea that to hold the towns was to be the King

• 55:20Speaker 02

  of Ireland. Another definition from the north of Ireland was to be able to take one's army through the other provinces of Ireland and return safely constituted being King of Ireland. And so depending on what your man was able to achieve, was he able to plausibly argue that he did not give submission to any other king in Ireland, and he was arguably the chief man in Ireland, well then arguably he could claim the title of King of Ireland. But even, you would have to acknowledge that even today, there's a semantic range in terms of what Ireland means, because it can, it can either mean the island, or it can mean the state which exists on the island alongside another state. And so some semantic range in the Middle Ages is not that surprising, really.

• 56:02Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. Medieval mind seems so much better than we are at having kind of fuzzy boundaries at the edges of its understandings of things and just allowing that to be, you know, you can almost find the- The way to make things work in not trying to define some of those boundaries too clearly. Medieval people, I think, were much better at that than we are today.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think certainly, I think certainly better than the academics that study them are always trying to define things as precisely as possible, where sometimes there was a deliberate vagueness in what they were trying to achieve by use of a certain term.

• 56:34Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. This has been absolutely fascinating chat. Thank you very much, Sean, for sharing all of your depth of knowledge with us about the Irish kingship. It's been absolutely fascinating to dig into it. Thank you.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Not at all. Thanks so much for having me on.

• 56:48Matt Lewis?

  You can listen to a series we did a little while ago on the Thomas Becket crisis that contributed to leading Henry the Second to Ireland. We've also got an episode on the history of medieval Scotland to complement this one. The documentaries we made on Irish castles are also now on History Hit's YouTube channel, so you can see the splendor of the Hill of Tara for free if you'd like. 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 also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries

• 57:31Matt Lewis?

  with a new release every week at historyhit.com/subscribe. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.

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