Snapshots in time
By Shane Hegarty
NAMES: Understanding the myriad plots and allegiances and twists in the story of the Flight of the Earls is not helped by how many of the names sound so similar. It is certainly not helped by just how many of those involved were called Hugh.
There was Hugh O'Neill, Hugh O'Donnell, Red Hugh O'Donnell, Hugh Gavelach MacShane and Hugh Maguire. They would also have gone by their Irish names (eg Red Hugh being Aodh Ruadh). Just as happens in modern Ireland, if fathers and sons shared first names it was common for the son to add óg (young). Sometimes, a"nickname" might be employed. Hugh O'Neill's grandfather was known as Conn Bacach ("the lame"), and his father in turn had been known as Conn Mór.
Adding to the difficulties are how the inter-family rivalries, and large number of siblings and half-siblings, means that the story contains little variation in surnames, and that even when they come they can be minimal (there are O'Donnells and MacDonnells). Also, Shane O'Neill's sons adapted their surname in traditional fashion, so that they became known as MacShane's rather than O'Neills. Finally, accounts often use much"elegant variation" in their description of these characters. For Hugh O'Neill alone, he is often referred to as the Baron of Dungannon, the Earl of Tyrone (or simply "Tyrone"), the O'Neill, lord, prince, or king of Tir Eoghan.
MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE: At the time it was quite common for chieftains to go through a handful of marriages, and produce a number of children, meaning that families were busy with half brothers and sisters. The law made no distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children. Many Irish noble families found that the hereditary line would detour through a child borne and raised by a woman with whom they had had a casual relationship. Hugh O'Neill's father, Matthew, became a famous case."Named" as the son of Conn Mor O'Neill when he became an adult, he became the hereditary heir to the title, causing a bloody split within the family. Whether or not he was indeed O'Neill's genetic son will remain an historical mystery.
Until the early 1600s, very few married in church ceremonies. Instead they were wed in secular ceremonies. This also meant that divorce was common. Hugh O'Neill divorced his first wife. As K.W. Nicholls writes: "The canon law of the medieval church insisted that no outward ceremony was necessary for a valid marriage, and that the mere declaration, or even intent, of the parties, followed by the consummation, constituted a permanently valid and binding, although clandestine, marriage."
ANIMALS: Animals were important elements of economic life. Horses were extremely common, among both rich and poor, given that they played a central role in agriculture, industry and war. Horses were a main export of Ireland at the time. Cattle were also used for their hides, meat, dairy and blood, although English accounts suggest that at this time Irish cattle were small in size and produced relatively low milk yields. Interestingly, the sheep of the time belonged to a now extinct native species, with long hairy fleece that was plucked each summer.
The wolf was relatively common in the Irish wild during this time in our history. In fact, the last authenticated wolf is recorded to have been killed by an irate farmer in Co Carlow in 1786. Between 1558-1589, 961 wolf skins were exported from Ireland to Bristol. Pine-martens were also hunted for their fur. Among other commercially important animals were eels and salmon.
FOSTERAGE: The practice of "fosterage", by which a noble family would give their children to another to be brought up, was commonplace in Gaelic Ireland. In fact, when the O'Donnells left Ireland, they had to leave a son behind having been unable to find his foster family in time. The practice has developed in earlier times as a form of alliance between families and would often be a stipulation of treaties between clans.
THE SPUD: The potato had only recently arrived in Ireland from South America. Although it is often reported to have been brought here by Sir Walter Raleigh, who planted it at his estate in Youghal, it is likely to have arrived here through trade with Spain. First planted here around 1580, it went on to become a staple of the Irish diet - and reliance on it would later prove disastrous.
POPULATION: The population of Ireland at the time was roughly around one million, while the world population is estimated to have been approximately 550 million - compared to 6.6 billion today. Both figures grew as the 17th century progressed.
Many of the Irish were mobile, often moving with their livestock depending on the season, and their houses reflected this. Often made of clay and straw, they could be put up quickly and abandoned easily. Houses were modest at the time, even among some noblemen who, as Fynes Moryson mocked, lived in a "a poor house of clay, or a cabin made of boughs and trees and covered with earth, for such are the dwellings of the very lords among them". However, others did live in stone castles, such as the O'Donnells in Lifford.
DISEASE: In 1604-05, Dublin was hit once again by the Black Death, which had ravaged the country as far back as 1348. Strict measures were put in place to control this outbreak of plague, with anyone wanting to leave the city required to have a licence from the mayor. A pesthouse was established outside the city at George's Lane (later renamed George's Street). The four men employed to look after the house were also expected to prevent patients, gripped by the delirium that marked the plague's final stages, from running into the streets and panicking citizens.
Only those coming from plague-free areas were allowed enter the city. As Maria Kelly explains in The Great Dying, citizens were also asked to light fires at their front doors three days a week in order to purge the air and prevent the spread of disease.
It was not the only disease of the time, of course. Smallpox, tuberculosis were big killers too. Among the soldiers who came here to fight, conditions were terrible and many died from illness well before they had a chance to die in battle. Dysentery was so common it was called "the disease of Ireland".
For more on this subject, see Gaelic Ireland: Gaelic and Gaelicized Ireland in the Middle Ages by K.W. Nicholls.
DUBLIN GETS A NEW 'COAT': Dublin City Council was granted its coat of arms in 1607. According to the council website: "The three castles are shown on the 13th century Dublin City Seal as three watchtowers surrounding one of the gates of the medieval City Wall. In the central watchtower two sentries sound the alarm, while in each of the other two towers an archer stands with cross-bow at the ready. The scene is symbolic of the readiness of the citizens to defend the city.
"With the passage of time, the three watchtowers became three separate castles, with three battlemented towers in each castle. Flames now appear from the towers in place of the sentries and archers. It is often supposed that the Castles are on fire, but in fact the flames symbolise zeal; they represent the zeal of the citizens in defence of Dublin."
The city's motto is "Obedienta Civium Urbis Felicitas", which can be translated as "Happy the city where citizens obey".
JAMES USSHER: James Ussher, became Professor of Theological Controversies in 1607, the most important professorship in the University of Dublin. One of the great theologians of his age, he went on to become archbishop of Dublin. Perhaps his most famous work was Annales veteris testamenti, in which he first laid out the idea that the world had been created at nightfall on the day preceding October 23rd, 4004 BC. Ussher's Quay and Ussher's Island in Dublin are named after him.
DUBLIN DRIES UP: Until 1607, many of the Dublin streets and quays that its current citizens plod over daily were actually underwater. That year, Sir James Carroll was granted a lease for 200 years at £5 per acre of 1000 acres of so much of the strand as was overflowed by the sea "between the point of land that joineth the College and the Ring's End". At this point water lapped up around the area on which the Irish Times office stands today in Tara Street.
THE REST OF THE WORLD IN 1607: England and Scotland were still separate countries - and would remain so for another 100 years, although by this time they shared a king and the Union Jack had been adapted as the flag of Great Britain the previous year. London was still recovering from an outbreak of plague in 1603-04, when 20 per cent of the city's population had died, and it would strike again in 1608. There was great tragedy elsewhere in this year when 2,000 people were killed when a tidal wave washed up the Bristol Channel. Recent research claims it was caused by a tsunami. (The great fire of London occurred in 1666.)
In 1607, the River Thames froze for the first time, something which is often seen as the beginning of a drop in global temperature known as the Little Ice Age. In the Netherlands, canals and rivers also froze over.
It was a crucial year in the history of north America as Jamestown, Virginia, became the first permanent English settlement in what would go on to become the United States. It was not the first attempt - there had been almost 20 previous ones - but it was the first to survive. From this miserable spot, infested with mosquitoes, colonists survived fire, bickering leaders and starvation until tobacco farming made it financially viable. In 1607, the Spanish also founded the first European colony on the west coast. Rio Grande would go on to become known as Santa Fe, the current capital of New Mexico.
Spain, which was in financial trouble by this time, suffered a massive defeat to the Dutch in a four-hour naval battle at Gibraltar in April. The entire Spanish fleet - 4,000 men and 21 ships - was destroyed.
In 1607, the composer Claudio Monteverdi wrote the L'Orfeo. It is considered a seminal moment in the history of music because its convergence of music and drama in which plot changes are clearly linked to the instrumentation has often seen it credited as the first true "opera".
William Shakespeare was also in full flow in 1607. King Lear was first performed at the very end of 1606, and he was now likely to have been working on the plays Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, and Pericles.
In this year, his first play to have been performed outside Europe happened at a most unlikely spot when Hamlet was performed on board the merchant ship, Red Dragon, anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone. It was an eventful year for him personally, as his daughter Susanna married a doctor, while his brother Edmund died a few months later.
