Ireland: Realm of the Four Masters

Abstract

On 9 January 1843, Richard Griffith addressed the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) about some antiquities found in the River Shannon. The river was being dredged to render it navigable, and the artefacts were discovered during the deepening of the old ford at Keelogue. Griffith was the chairman of the Commissioners carrying out the work, and his expertise was in engineering rather than ancient history. He stated that the finds came from a layer of gravel; in its upper part were many bronze swords and spears, while a foot lower were numerous stone axes. Due to the rapidity of the river’s flow there was very little aggradation, so despite the small gap the bronze objects were substantially later than the stone ones. The river formed the border between the ancient kingdoms of Connaught and Leinster. The objects had apparently been lost in two battles for the ford that had taken place at widely differing dates; stressing that he was no expert himself, Mr Griffith wondered whether ancient Irish history might contain records of battles at this spot (Griffith 1844). This was probably the earliest non-funerary stratigraphic support for the Three Age System ever published, but it did not signal the acceptance of the Three Age System. Just as telling as Griffith’s stratigraphic observation was his immediate recourse to ancient history for an explanation; for, as we shall see, ancient history provided the dominant framework for the ancient Irish past until the end of the nineteenth century. The Irish had far more early manuscript sources than the Scots or the English, although wars and invasions had reduced them; the Welsh scholar Edward Lhwyd wrote from Sligo on 12 March 1700 to his colleague Henry Rowlands that ‘the Irish have many more ancient manuscripts than we in Wales; but since the late revolutions they are much lessened. I now and then pick up some very old parchment manuscripts; but they are hard to come by, and they that do anything understand them, value them as their lives’ (in Rowlands 1766: 315). In the seventeenth century various Irish scholars brought together the historical accounts available to them. Geoffrey Keating (Seathrú n Céitinn, in Irish) wrote the influential Foras Feasa ar Éirinn or ‘History of Ireland’ in c.1634, and an English translation was printed in 1723 (Waddell 2005).