The Danes in Dublin
1 Sep 1971The Scandinavian towns, Dublin, Limerick, Cork, Waterford and Wexford, have suffered from the fact that they have all continued as cities up to our time, the modern houses covering up the traces of the Viking settlements.
Dublin is probably the only one which repays study. The modern town and its harbour are built on both sides of the estuary of the Liffey, now a narrow river confined between
In olden times the tidal river was certainly much wider, especially at its meeting with the tributaries on the south side, the Poddle and Camac. The erratic course of the Poddle, which nowadays runs below the streets, has been carefully studied. Coming from the south and meeting the long low hill which bordered the Liffey, it spread out in a vast marsh with a few islands of higher ground. Then, at the eastern end of the hill, it joined the Liffey, the confluence probably forming a small natural harbour. This harbour and the marsh were referred to as the Black Pool (Dubh Linn).
The hill is one of the boulder clay moraines left by prehistoric glaciers which are so common in the central Irish plain. As they drain easily they were favourite sites for raths in the early Middle Ages. This was probably the case here, and the eastern end of the hill seems to have been the site of an establishment combining the characteristics of rath and crannog as it was threatened with infiltrations of water at the spring tides, To overcome this disadvantage, its floor was probably covered with mats of wattle similar to those which covered the platform of the Ballinderry crannog. Nearby, a ford made it possible to cross the river at low tide on the way towards Tara and Armagh. The name of the place—Ath Cliath, the ford of the wattles—may derive either from the structure of the rath, or from the presence of wattles in the ford itself.
There was, on one of the islands in the marsh of the Poddle below the hill, a small monastery which took its name from the Black Pool. Very little is known about it, though it figures twice in the Annals of the Four Masters. In 650 they relate the death of St. Bearaigh, abbot of Dubhlinn, in 785 that of another abbot, Siadhal. Onfe oi the churches of the monastery was probably on the very site where a dedication to St Patrick has survived to oui own day, in the thirteenth century cathedral.
The present building stands only a few feet from the subterranean course of the Poddle, but the original lay-out of the ground is well defined by a twelfth – century text which mentions “Ecclesia s. Patrick de Insula—the church of St. Patrick of the Island’. Another neighbouring, church, whose Norman name ‘was St. de Pole, was dedicated, not to the archangel but to MacThail, a sixth-century saint, so that it also could be a very old foundation. Both churches probably belonged to the monastery in the island of the Poddle and were no doubt re-erected in the eleventh century, after a century and a half of Viking occupation. It is possible that some carved stone slabs which have been found on various occasions near St. Patrick’s cathedral, may be all that remains of the early foundation.
Some distance upstream still on the south bank of the Liffey, theeo was another small monastery Cill Maighnenn (Kilmainham) also going back to the sixth century. The death of a “sage” belonging to it is recorded at the end of the eighth century, but nothing more. Its site is marked by the shaft of a curious stone cross. Further to the south-west, still to the south of the Liffey, stood the monastery of Clondalkin. and, near the spring of the Poddle, that of Tallaght, founded at the end of the eight century by Maelruan, which, around 800, together with its twin monastery of Finglas, had been a great centre of spiritual and ascetic activity. We have seen that the latter, which was about two miles north of the Liffey, disappeared shortly after 860. The imposing plain stone cross there may then date back to the end of the eighth or the first half of the ninth century. Further to the north-east, at Swords, there was a Columban monastery of considerable importance.
It is in this diffuse pattern made up of different types of establishments that the Scandinavian colony of Dublin took its place. In 836 the Four Masters say that “Ath Cliath was taken for the first time” by the Norwegians. In 840, the Annals announce that the “foreigners” are building a fort at Dubhlinn. This fort probably superseded the Irish settlement of Ath Cliath, but may have covered from the start a much wider portion of the promontory. It was already a walled city and it is probable that, at the time or shortly afterwards, it occupied the same area as the medieval city which was enclosed in fortifications of which some much re-built and restored fragments still subsist below the church of St Audoen and along Lamb Alley. It stretched from there as far as the place where the east wing of the castle was erected in the thirteenth century, that is to say on a length of about 560 yards and a width of 330 yards.
The other excavated site, at the corner of High Street and Nicholas Street, has yielded the ruins of houses whose walls were built of wattle and which probably belong to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, perhaps even to the late tenth. Underneath was an earlier layer which contained a few Scandinavian objects, amongst them a spear-head of a typical shape and a lead weight decorated with a gold stud. This layer lay directly on the boulder clay, so that it seems that the Irish eighth-century settlement did not spread this far.
From these excavations which may still have surprises in store for us, one can begin to get some idea of the appearance of the town in the first centuries of its existence; a city of elongated shape, more than 600 yards long, watching over its harbour from the top of a promontory surrounded by water on three sides. It probably consisted chiefly of houses built of planks like those in Scandinavia, crowded along narrow streets. We do not so far know anything of the wall which surrounded them, nor of the habitation of the kings of Dublin which is also likely to have been built of wood, nor of the wharves where the goods brought from the four corners of the world were piled up.
A complement to our knowledge of the city and its inhabitants is supplied by the Viking tombs discovered from time to time about a mile upstream near Kilmainham, which seems to have been the burial place of the citizens of the new town.
So we see that Dublin was always a Viking or Danish city. In due course it did become the political metropolis of the country, but that too was the decision of foreigners, for the Normans, when they came here in 1166 also based themselves upon Dublin and in that way the city became the political capital of the Pale and subsequently of the whole country. That was the position when Dail Eireann was founded in 1918 and Dublin has remained the capital of Ireland to this very day and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
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