The Old Irish World

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Green Alice Stopford. The Old Irish World

CHAPTER I. THE WAY OF HISTORY IN IRELAND

CHAPTER II. THE TRADE ROUTES OF IRELAND

CHAPTER III. A GREAT IRISH LADY

CHAPTER IV. A CASTLE AT ARDGLASS

CHAPTER V. TRADITION IN IRISH HISTORY

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IN all the countries of Europe the study of history for a citizen of the State is taken for granted, as the study of tides and currents might be held necessary for a mariner, or of the winds for an air-man, or that of the map for a merchant. It is only a dozen years ago, however, that its study was made compulsory in elementary schools in England, and in that country men are still discussing, by way of lectures and so forth, “What is the Use of History.” The historical instinct among the English people has indeed never been very keen, so that, as learned men tell us, it would be more difficult to form a folk-museum in England than in any other country, so few are the objects of a distinctly national character that have survived. The past is rapidly overlaid among men who live intensely in the present and the immediate future. A great gulf separates them from a race like the Irish, to whom the far past and the far future are part of the eternal present, the very condition of thought, the furniture without which the mind is bare.

The Irish, nevertheless, have by long effort been brought under authority to the English mind in history, and an Anglicised Ireland now lies in the wake of England, a laggard in the trough of the wave, rocked by the old commonplaces of the early Victorian age. The hope that our people may win out of that trough lies to a great extent in the new sails set by the National University, if they may at last catch the fresh breezes of Heaven, and be swept into the open sea of free knowledge and candid thinking. In Ireland, as in England, history has been made compulsory in a sense – a sense, we might irreverently say, of the “United Kingdom.” It has been made a department of English Grammar, and has further been portioned out to Irishmen as a fragment of English history, strictly confined within dates fixed for that history in the schools of England. The Irish story is thus shut up as it were like criminals of old in the Tower prison of Little Ease – a narrow place where no man could stand or lie at length. And Irishmen are still driven to discuss in belated fashion the question that all Europe settled long ago – Why should we make the History of our country our serious study?

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The story begins with a Bohemian baron, name unknown, whom Foynes Moryson, an Englishman, saw on one occasion. Here is the exact tale: – “The foresaid Bohemian baron, coming out of Scotland to us by the north parts of the wild Irish, told me in great earnestness (when I attended him at the Lord Deputy’s command), that he coming to the house of the O’Cane, a great lord among them, was met at the door with sixteen women, all naked, excepting their loose mantles; whereof eight or ten were very fair, and two seemed very nymphs; with which strange sight his eyes being dazzled, they led him into the house, and there sitting down by the fire with crossed legs like tailors, and so low as could not but offend chaste eyes, desired him to sit down with them. Soon after O’Kane, the lord of the country, came in all naked excepting a loose mantle and shoes, which he put off as soon as he came in, and entertaining the baron after his best manner in the Latin tongue, desired him to put off his apparel, which he thought to be a burden to him, and to sit naked by the fire with his naked company.”

Now on this tale let me make two or three remarks.

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