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Geoffrey Keating, The History of Ireland/Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (1634)

Geoffrey Keating was born in South Tipperary, south-west of Mallow, around 1580, of ‘Old English’ (Sean-Ghaill) or Anglo-Norman stock. He presumably grew up well aware of the near-genocide that had occurred in Desmond (South Munster) some decades before his birth, and knew also of the Nine Years War that was going on in Ulster in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign. Not much is known of his personality or private life other than what is offered the reader by his written work. As Bernadette Cunningham remarks in her wonderful study The World of Geoffrey Keating, ‘The real Geoffrey Keating is more elusive than Shakespeare. No manuscript in his hand has been identified and none of his contemporaries mentions having met him.’1 He seems to have come from a comfortable landed family in the barony of Iffa and Offa and was educated at a local school of poetry specialising in Irish and Latin manuscripts. He studied theology in France (Rheims and Bordeaux) as was the custom for Catholic seminarians of that time and later was ordained to the priesthood. He returned to Ireland around 1610. He died no later than 1644.2 Writing extensively in Irish, his first work was Eochair-Sgiath an Aifrinn (The Key Shield of the Mass), a defence of the Catholic Mass. He became well known in the south of Ireland as a preacher, and eventually published the background material to his sermons as Trí Bior-Ghaoithe an Bháis (The Three Spears of Death) around 1631. However, he is best remembered for his four-volume history of Ireland, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (Compendium of Knowledge about Ireland) published in 1634 (hereafter referred to as FFE). This work continues to be valued not only for being a compendium of Irish history, pseudo-history and mythology but also for being the first major historical work to be written in modern Irish. It is still quite accessible to anyone reasonably familiar with the modern version of the language and able to deal with the old spelling which was to be replaced eventually by a more streamlined official standard in the 1950s.3 Keating was evidently competent in Old and Middle Irish as well as Latin and his book became the major conduit by which versions of old tales and the common mediaeval version of the history of the Irish race was passed on to an increasingly literate and English-speaking country.

Inevitably, FFE was appropriated for political purposes unimagined by Keating in his historical era, and was to become material for unionist and nationalist self-justifications in the eighteenth century and after. Keating was commonly titled ‘the Irish Herodotus’. Herodotus was, of course, the early fifth-century Greek writer who was famous for his extraordinary blending of myth, unverifiable if entertaining anecdotes and genuine historical information. However, Herodotus was traditionally known to the Greeks not only as being the Father of History but also as the Father of Lies. It was the Greek historian’s fate to be contrasted tacitly with the evidence-based scientific approach represented by his successor Thucydides in his extraordinary eye-witness analysis of the Peloponnesian War (432–404 BC). This is not to suggest that Keating was the Irish equivalent of either Greek figure because he had a healthy scepticism about many of the accounts and fables which he presented to the reader combined with an unquestioning acceptance of writings which he held to be divine Revelation. To be fair, he tended to distance himself from the more outlandish anecdotes and narratives which the traditional lore offered him.

An ambivalent contemporary recommendation of Keating to the historian Luke Wadding by a Church of Ireland bishop (John Roche) displayed scepticism of Popish pleadings:

One Doctor Keating laboureth much in compiling Irish notes towards a history in Irish. The man is very studious, and yet I fear that if his work ever come to light it will need an amendment of ill-warranted narrations; he could help you to many curiosities of which you can make better use than himself. I have no interest in the man, for I never saw him, for he dwelleth in Munster.4

In the early seventeenth century, Catholicism in Ireland was a reluctantly tolerated religion, keeping its head down and defending itself in whispers rather than in bellicose sermons. Corish describes it accurately as becoming increasingly ‘hidden’ in the period between 1700 and 1800.5 The Flight of the Earls and the beginning of the Ulster plantations in the first decade of the seventeenth century symbolised the slow approach of a new, putatively Protestant order in Ireland. Keating’s book, which is a claim for the essentially authentic character of a Catholic Irish nation going back to the fifth century and with links to a semi-imaginary but very noble pagan prehistory, was, by the standards of the time and place, unusually self-assertive. The complete breakdown of the Catholic and Jacobite cause lay two generations in the future, after Aughrim’s Great Disaster of 1691.

FFE begins with a long and polemical introduction (díonbhrollach) which denounces various English, Welsh and Anglo-Irish (Palesman) historical writers who, in Keating’s view, betrayed their noble academic calling by libelling the Irish, an ancient and noble people who had been the founders of a great and early civilisation on the island of Ireland, later extended to North Britain in the form of the Kingdom of Scotland or, in Irish, Alba (‘Albion’, or the Gaels’ share of Great Britain, Albion being the White Island as seen from France). The argument was that the Irish were learned and that their monks had reintroduced learning and writing into western Europe, including Britain, after the barbarisation of the continent in the aftermath of the fall of the Western Empire in the fifth century. Not only were the ancient Irish very learned, they were also brave, and they had at one stage allegedly invaded Britain under a King Dáithí and got as far as the Alps before going home in triumph, their king having unfortunately got himself killed. Almost certainly, this is a mediaeval fable. The first paragraph of the book sets out his purpose clearly:

Whosoever proposes to trace and follow up the ancient history and origin of any country ought to determine on setting down plainly the method which reveals most clearly the truth of the state of the country, and the condition of the people who inhabit it: and forasmuch as I have undertaken to investigate the groundwork of Irish historical knowledge, I have thought at the outset of deploring some part of her affliction and of her unequal contest; especially the unfairness which continues to be practised on her inhabitants, alike the old foreigners who are in possession more than four hundred years from the Norman invasion down, as well as the native Irish who have had possession during almost three thousand years. For there is no historian of all those who have written on Ireland from that epoch that has not continuously sought to cast reproach and blame both on the old foreign settlers and on the native Irish.6

These allegedly malicious and uninformed writers are accused by Keating of not acknowledging the favourable characteristics of Irish people: their evident bravery, their religious piety, their generosity to the church, their ancient respect for learning and, unlike some of their twentieth-century descendants, their humane treatment of orphans. The writers are accused of ignoring the extraordinary hospitality of the Irish shown to foreigners in their midst and of paying no attention to the literary assemblies of the Irish, institutions unique in Europe. They concentrate on the poor and marginalised among the Irish, thus dismissing the great and the good among the gentry of Ireland; unlike other nations, the Irish are to be characterised by these mainly English or Welsh writers by the features of the deprived and depraved rather than by the virtues of the noble and high-born among them. Keating again demonstrates to his own satisfaction the valour of the Irish by pointing to the great wall the Romans felt forced to build against the allied tribes of the Irish and their Gaelic-speaking colonists in North Britain, the Scots, who were in turn allied with the non-Gaelic Picts. Strabo, an ancient writer, imagined that the Irish were cannibals, but there is only one instance of cannibalism mentioned in the Irish annals, and this was seen as so abnormal as to get special mention.7 Camden claimed there were no bees in Ireland, a ridiculous proposition remarks Keating, easily refuted by casual observation. Here there may be some echo through mistranslation of the well-known fact that there were, and still are, no snakes in the island. St Patrick is traditionally supposed to have banished snakes from Ireland. Giraldus Cambrensis has a celebrated book chapter, one sentence long, which is entitled ‘Snakes in Ireland’. The sentence announces that there are no snakes in Ireland.

Cambrensis, who wrote a celebrated and comically hostile anatomy of Ireland, comes in for special mention by Keating. ‘Gerald of Wales’ alleged that Ireland paid tribute to King Arthur of Caerleon, an absurd story, refuted by Cambrensis himself later in his own work, when he observes that ‘From the first, Ireland has remained free from the invasion of any foreign nation.’ Even the Romans decided not to meddle with the Irish, and Ireland was a refuge for many who wished to flee from tyrannical Roman rule. This seems to be a remote echo of Agricola’s characterisation (in Tacitus’ Agricola) of a first-century independent Ireland living in a notorious freedom and being a provocation to rebellious elements among the British tribes in the time of the Western Empire. Keating twits Spenser’s fraudulent attempts to interpret surnames which are evidently Gaelic or gaelicised Viking as being in reality derived from ordinary English surnames. Here he is attacking a common English and Scottish tendency to describe the Irish as degenerate English and Scots, rather than constituting an historically distinct cultural entity. He rebukes Palesman historian Richard Stanihurst for his apparent hatred of his own countrymen, presumably an emotion often fuelled in invaders by mingled subconscious guilt and fear of vengeance being wreaked on the English lands in the Pale of Dublin by a revived and vengeful Gaelic Ireland. That alternative Ireland was seen as roosting in the hills of Wicklow and looking down hungrily on the fair pastures of Dublin.

From the worthlessness of the testimony Stanihurst gives concerning the Irish, I consider he should be rejected as a witness, because it was purposely at the instigation of a party who were hostile to the Irish that he wrote contemptuously of them; and, I think, that hatred of the Irish must be the first dug he drew after his first going into England to study, and that it lay as a weight on his stomach till, having returned to Ireland, he ejected it by his writing. I deem it no small token of the aversion he had for the Irish, that he finds fault with the colonists of the English province [in Ireland] for that they did not banish the Gaelic [language] from the country at the time when they routed the people who were dwelling in the land before them. He also says, however excellent the Gaelic language may be, that whoever smacks thereof, would likewise savour of the ill manners of the folk whose language it is. What is to be understood from this, but that Stanihurst had so great a hatred for the Irish, that he deemed it an evil that it was a Christian-like conquest the Gaill had achieved over Ireland and the Gael, and not a pagan conquest.8

Here can be seen a major theme of FFE. The Norman incursion into Ireland in 1169 and afterwards is seen as a benign event, one which laid the foundation for a joint Hiberno-English nation in Ireland, united in loyalty to the Catholic faith and acceptant of the union with England under the (Catholic) crown of England, seen as the legitimate successor to the High-Kings of Ireland. There seems to be a tacit paralleling of the 1169 event with the legendary Milesian incursion of a millennium earlier, seen as equally benign. This Christian conquest by the Normans is unconvincingly described as peaceful and involving settling mainly on unoccupied land. It is explicitly contrasted with ‘pagan’ invasions by the English which happened later, after the death of King John in 1215 and which did indeed involve the illegitimate stealing of the lands and properties of the Gaelic nobility and gentry by incomers. It also involved criminal assault on the sacred lands of the Church by these hypocritical marauders, pretending to be civilising the Irish and bringing them back into the fold of a true and civil Christianity:

The Irish were at length enraged by these unsupportable [thirteenth century] oppressions, for when they observed that the English, instead of propagating the religion of Christ, and reforming the rugged manners of the people, had nothing in view but plunder and booty, and that churches and monasteries were not exempt from their covetous and sacrilegious attempts, they formed a design to free themselves from such merciless auxiliaries, and to drive them out of the island. For this purpose the principle of the Irish nobility applied themselves to O’Connor Maoinmuighe, king of Conacht, and offered to raise him to the sovereignty of the island, if he would but assist to expel these foreigners, and restore liberty to his country. The first who made these proposals to the king of Conacht was Daniel O’Bryen, king of Limerick, who was followed in the same generous design by Roger, son of Dunsleibhe, king of Ulster, Daniel Mac Carty, king of Desmond, Maolseachluin Beag, king of Meath, and by O’Rourke, king of O’Broin and O’Conmaine. But before any resolutions were formed upon this scheme, O’Connor, king of Conacht was unfortunately killed by an accident …9

This kind of denunciation particularly applied to the recent transfer of lands from Catholic to Protestant hands, a process he saw already happening in the early seventeenth century. Obviously, he did not live to see the wholesale transfer of nearly the entire island of Ireland and the expulsion of its entire Catholic ruling class that occurred later in the seventeenth century and early eighteenth, but his words were prescient. Furthermore, they helped to delegitimise the seventeenth-century land grab and keep the memory of it fresh in Irish people’s minds for over two centuries.

Keating had mediaeval standards of evidence. There is a wonderful attempt in the book to explain how it was that so much was known about the history of Ireland before the deluge since presumably everyone in Ireland was drowned, like nearly everything on the planet. He does distance himself from the account he gives, suggesting somewhat desperately that perhaps, being pagans, the scribes were informed by demons, or perhaps it was all written down in stone somewhere. Elsewhere he suggests that a few people survived despite not being on the Ark.10 He also mentions tentatively the legend of Tuan mac Cairell but does not relate it. Tuan, a son of a sixth-century king of Ulster, was represented in the mythology as a very long-lived antediluvian shape-changer who survived the inundation by turning into a fish which is later caught, fed to a princess to whom he is reborn and eventually grows up to tell the tale of Parthelon and company from personal memory.11

The main body of the book is a classic example of mediaeval macro-history. The Old Testament is accepted unquestioningly as an historical account, derived from Revelation, of the history of mankind since Adam and Eve, seen as living some six millennia earlier, and separated from us by the great deluge that flooded the entire planet some five thousand years previously. The Irish are claimed to be descended mainly from Scythia, seen as the source of the population of ancient Palestine and Judea, with a later admixture coming from Spain into Ireland led by Galamh, or Míl Easpáine, Miles Hispaniae or Soldier of Spain. Oddly enough, modern DNA testing confirms the existence of North Spanish ancestry among the modern population of Ireland, most of the Irish being now seen as descended from near Eastern migrants through Europe to these Islands. Possibly the prehistoric Spanish immigrants were blown in on ships by the prevailing westerly winds. Alternatively, it has been suggested speculatively by modern Celtic scholars that the Milesian legend echoes a faint memory of Roman foederati or barbarian allied troops coming into Ireland with Roman soldiering experience to set themselves up for life somewhere far away from the continent’s wars.

Besides the Bible, a major source of the book is the Lebor Gabala (Leabhar Ghabhála or Book of Invasions), a mythical history of Ireland put together between the sixth and twelfth centuries. It was designed in part to devise a fictional noble ancestry for the O’Neill dynasty so as to strengthen its claims to the High-Kingship of Ireland. Other sources included Acallam na Senórach (Conversations of the Ancients), Cogadh Gael re Gallaibh (The Wars of the Irish and the Vikings), Cambrensis’ Expugnatio Hiberniae (Conquest of Ireland), Flaithusa Eireann (Regnal Lists of Ireland) and Saltair Chaisil (Psalter of Cashel) together with an impressive list of manuscript books in Irish, English and Latin held at that time in various monasteries and great houses around Ireland. The narrative includes a boiled-down version of the narrative of the Táin Bó Chualnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley) with its legendary war by the Men of Ireland on the men of Ulster and the heroic defence of Ulster by the solar hero Cú Chulain (‘The Hound of Culain’). It also covers the colonisation of western Scotland, and an almost endless listing of raids, battles, duels between champions and, eventually, the coming of Patrick in the fifth century, seen as the crucial event in Irish history. This rather contrasts with the modern nationalist view, which tends to see the Viking and Norman invasions as the crucial and disastrous main set of events. Keating argues for an Irish identity which includes all Christians loyal to the Roman faith and which explicitly excludes the recent Nua-Ghaill who happen to be mainly Protestant and therefore imperfectly Christian and almost pagan. They are also, of course, rather low-class folk.

The book circulated far and wide in manuscript in the seventeenth century, and was translated in full or in summary several times into English in its first two centuries.12 However, it was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that the full Irish and English texts were published in parallel translation. English-language versions were available by the early eighteenth century, most conspicuously represented by Dermod O’Connor’s Keating’s General History of Ireland, first published in 1723, reprinted many times and read widely by the emergent nationalist movement’s adherents in the nineteenth century with James Duffy’s Dublin reprints being much favoured. John O’Mahony, the famous Fenian leader, also tried his hand at a translation, published in New York in 1857.

FFE was used as a source by many later historical and pseudo-historical works, in particular by Roderick O’Flaherty’s Ogygia, a moderate and respectful history of Ireland, derived in great part from Keating. It dealt with events down to the eleventh century and was published originally in Latin in 1685. The book celebrates the long and learned intellectual tradition of the Celtic Irish, seen as one of the most ancient nations of the earth and one of the most distinguished. Hely’s English translation of Ogygia appeared in the early eighteenth century, and it was reprinted many times.13 Like FFE, it became grist to the nationalists’ mill in the following centuries.

Brendan Bradshaw, in a brilliant essay, has described Keating’s book as being, in effect, a rallying cry to a nascent Irish Catholic nation by providing it with an origin myth of benign and peaceful incursions into Ireland later betrayed by an illegitimate stealing of the land and polity of Ireland in Keating’s own century.14 It could be counter-argued that Keating was also the innocent legitimator of a definition of the Irish nation that excluded all non-Catholics from potential membership of that nation. Certainly, as Marc Caball has argued, he was Irish Catholicism’s leading intellectual, historian and poet of the seventeenth century.15 His poetry is still remembered, the most well-known being perhaps Patrick Pearse’s favourite, A Bhean lán de Stuaim (O woman of great subtlety).

Right up to the present, Keating’s best-known book has lived on, partly because it was the first major book to be ‘published’ in the modern Irish language and partly because it is a genuine source for mediaeval Irish writing, most of which is linguistically inaccessible to most modern Irish readers and some of which is no longer extant, having not survived the wars and destruction of the seventeenth-century ‘Taking of Ireland’ or the burning out of the Great Houses and their libraries by the anti-Treaty IRA in 1922–23. It was a standard text for undergraduates taking Irish language courses in Irish universities throughout the twentieth century. Keating’s influence has been extraordinarily persistent and wide. Eamon de Valera, for example, used Keating as late as 1947 as a source of abuse of his political opponents. Referring specifically to Oliver Flanagan, he compared the deputy to a mud-loving insect documented by Keating.16 To an unknowable extent, FFE has been the direct or indirect source of a kind of folklore that was once familiar to most Irish children. For better or worse, that particular folklore has now faded out. Much of the pseudo-history of traditionalist outfits like the IRA is directly or indirectly inspired by Geoffrey Keating.

TG

Notes

1Bernadette Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), p.xiii.

2Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Keating, Geoffrey’, Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge and Dublin: Cambridge University Press and Royal Irish Academy, 2009), vol. 5, pp.42–4.

3Geoffrey Keating/Seathrún Céitinn, The History of Ireland/Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, translation by David Comyn and Patrick S. Dineen (London: The Irish Texts Society, David Nutt, 4 vols, 1902–1914), written MS circa 1634.

4Patrick J. Corish, The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dublin: Helicon, 1981), p.41.

5Ibid., pp.2–3.

6See Keating, The History of Ireland/Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, trans. David Comyn, vol. I, p.3. The two populations are normally referred to by Keating as Sean-Ghaill and Gaeil. The spelling has been modernised.

7Ibid., pp.10–11.

8Ibid., pp.36–7.

9Dermod O’Connor, Keating’s General History of Ireland: Translated from the original Irish, with many curious amendments taken from the Psalters of Tara and Cashel & c. (Dublin: James Duffy, 1865), p.545.

10See Keating, The History of Ireland/Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, pp.151–5.

11Cf. for example Robin Flower, The Irish Tradition [1947] (Dublin: Lilliput, 1994), pp.14–15.

12See Raymond Gillespie, Reading Ireland (Manchester: University Press, 2005), p.14 for MS distribution of FFE.

13See Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating, pp.204–5. My own edition of O’Flaherty (Hely’s translation) dates from 1793, and my O’Connor version of FFE is James Duffy, undated but probably 1860s.

14Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Reading Seathrún Céitinn’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn’, in Pádraig O Riain (ed.), Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn: Reassessments (Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1986), pp.1–18.

15Marc Caball, ‘Patriotism, Culture and Identity: the Poetry of Keating’, in Pádraig O Riain (ed.), Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn: Reassessments (London: 1986), pp.19–39.

16Elaine A. Byrne, Political Corruption in Ireland 1922–2010, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p.56.