If most of the earlier battles were fought far away from Dublin in places nearer to the south, the west and the northern coasts, later centuries redressed the balance. The engagements of the later period were very many of them fought in the approaches to Dublin, and, save for the fighting in Antrim and Down and the battles with the French in Connacht and Longford, the rebellion of 1798 was almost altogether a Leinster affair.

Sea power was an important factor, even though it has not beert a widely noticed one, in the Irish wars. The Irish were not interested in the sea, a curious deficiency in an island people. The maritime exploits of the dwellers on the west coast, particularly the O'Malleys and O'Flahertys, are notable only because they are unusual; they show up the lack of interest of the rest. The English, on the other hand, were amphibious. They used their prowess at sea with great effect in the war against Hugh O'Neill, and from the sixteenth century forward they never failed to guard the coasts of Ireland against invasion. Since Norman times, they ferried warlike supplies across the Irish Sea, and when the theatre of war lay on the east coast of Ireland, as it did in Crom-well's time and again in 1690, the use of English shipping for reinforcement and supply facilitated the movements of the English armies. Cromwell never operated in Ireland far away from the sea.

Thus, a general survey of the Irish wars provides an explanation of the territorial distribution of the battlefields. It also explains the pattern of this distribution. The history of Ireland is one of assimilation and resistance, the assimilation of outside elements into the population and the resistance of outside control. This control was exercised from Dublin, and when resistance showed itself in organised military effort Dublin became naturally and increasingly the prime military objective. P. H. Pearse, the leader of the 1916 rising, was an organiser of revolution rather than a soldier, but his attention and that of his comrades was directed almost exclusively to Dublin. Irish resistance had, by 1916, come back to the scene of the original penetration.

The battle of Clontarf, fought outside Dublin on Good Friday, 23 April 1014, was the greatest battle of the early period ofIrish history. Its lustre has not, over the intervening centuries, been dimmed; rather has its fame increased, so that it has come to be remembered as an event of a golden age, a mighty feat of arms of which Ireland was capable 'ere her faithless sons betrayed her'.

Clontarf was a victory for the native side; Hastings, fought for the defence of England half a century later, was-on the same analysis-a defeat. Yet the Irish battle was not followed, as the victory of William the Conqueror was, by an era of nation-building. It was followed by a century and more of disorder culminating in the successful invasion of Ireland by the victors of Hastings, the Normans. Since Clontarf ended in the tumbling of the Norsemen into the sea, and since Ireland experienced no more Viking raids after 1014, we regard it as the repulse of an invasion; but it was that only in a minor degree. Primarily it was a great and unsuccessful battle fought for the unity of Ireland. It is not, perhaps, surprising that we have chosen to remember the one aspect of it and to forget the other. We forget that an army of Leinster Irishmen fought beside the Norsemen on the losing side.

If Brian Boru - Brian of the Tributes - High King of Ireland, had been a younger man when he won the battle of Clontarf, and if he had lived to exploit his victory, his hand would, almost certainly, have descended heavily on the kingdom of Leinster. The Leinstermen had never willingly recognised a High King. By their action in opposing Brian at Clontarf they sought to destroy the unity of Ireland which he had envisaged ten years previously when, at a solemn moment in the church at Armagh, he declared himself Emperor of the Gael.

If Brian had been able to justify assumption of that title and to make good that unity, then Clontarf would have been a victory indeed. But he whose personality colours his age and whose name has come resounding down the centuries was an old man at the climax of his career and was killed at the moment of his success.

He began as the leader of the small state of Dal Chais at the mouth of the river Shannon. His neighbours were the Norse invaders, the descendants of the Vikings, who had founded the town of Limerick. By the end of the tenth century he had subdued these isolated Norsemen and had won for himself, first, the king-ship of Munster and then, by defeating the Leinstermen and the Norse inhabitants of Dublin, the overlordship of the southern half of Ireland. The Dublin Norse were the founders of what was to become the capital of Ireland, and they ruled at this time over a considerable part of the seacoast stretching from the mouth of the river Boyne to Arklow.In 1002. Brian Boru overawed the only other ruler who could rival him in power or in prospects, Malachy, King of Meath and holder of the High Kingship. Brian became High King. Malachy and the north and west of Ireland seem to have acquiesced in this assumption of a title of paramountcy which conferred on its holder as much authority as he could enforce. Leinster, in the persons of Maelmora, who was its king, and Gormflath, who was Maelmora's sister, did not acquiesce. The name of Gormflath, who, according to the Norsemen, was 'the fairest of all women' but who 'did all things ill over which she had any power', comes down to us in the drama of history as the evil genius of what followed.

Some of the romantic accounts of the battle that were written soon after it was fought make a great deal of the personalities concerned. According to their writers, the conflict of Clontarf was a matter of the passions of a few people-the passions of Kings Brian and Malachy; of Murchad, who was Brian's son; of the Leinster pair, Maelmora and Gormflath; and of Sitric, the Norse-Irish King of Dublin, whose mother was the much-married Gormflath and whose father was the Norseman Olaf Cuaran.

The story is complicated by the fact that the relationships of these people were involved. Gormflath, who incited her brother Maelmora to challenge Brian, was-most amazingly-the dis-carded wife of both Brian and Malachy. In view of this entangle-ment of the dramatis personae, Clontarf was a domestic squabble of the first order. But there were much wider issues.

Leinster was a misfit in Brian's new kingdom. The Leinstermen must be coerced into submission to him; otherwise they might destroy him. They were, in their desire for independence, pre-pared to break up the unity which he had built. The Dublin Norse, who were a rich and powerful body, had not yet been absorbed into the Irish system. They too were a dangerous element, an alien element in a country of explosive minor states. Until Malachy, King of Meath, had pushed them back some years before this, they had threatened to dominate the midlands. Out-side Ireland the Norse peoples were still on the move. There were still Vikings on the seas. Svend, King of Denmark, had just then established his dominion over a great part of England. Half a century later Harold Hardrada of Norway, bent on plunder or conquest, was killed while leading a new invasion of England. The rise of a Norse kingdom of Ireland on the ruins of Brian's empire of the Gael was not an impossibility.

The story of Gormflath's jealousy that makes up the greater part of what the chroniclers have to tell us of Clontarf may be an intimate disclosure of real court intrigue; but there were greater forces moving in the background. There were motives other than personal ones for the strife. The war began in 1013, with Brian and Malachy, the reigning High King and the previous one, on one side and Maelmora and Sitric, the brother of Gormflath and her son, on the other. Accord-ing to the romantic literature, Gormflath chided Maelmora for his lack of spirit in paying tribute to Brian. Stung by her words, Maelmora was easily led to quarrel with Brian's son Murchad. There were angry passages, and Maelmora left Brian's court, vowing vengeance for the insults which he had received. He roused the Leinstermen and the Norsemen of Dublin against Brian, who collected his forces and marched against them. Dublin was besieged.

The first was a drawn round. Brian gave up the siege at Christmas and went home to his territory of Dal Chais. Both sides, however, made ready to renew the fight. When they took the field again in spring both had been reinforced. Sitric's Dublinmen had with them Sigurd from the Orkneys, Brodar from the Isle of Man, and their followers, a small but formidable gathering of the famous fighting material that had already overrun the Western Isles and that was to contribute so much, in the commingling of blood, to the Highland Scottish race. The Norse account of these happenings, the Saga of Burnt Njal, bears out the Irish ones in the extraordinary role attributed to Gormflath.

According to the Saga, Sitric promised his mother's hand, together with the rule of the Norse Kingdom of Dublin, to [i]both[i] Sigurd and Brodar. Maelmora's contribution to the Dublin force was the full hosting of the men of North Leinster. South Leinster, adopting the attitude of the greater part of Ireland, held aloof. The authority of the North Leinster rulers was seldom effective there.

On the other side were the warriors of the D:H Chais, assisted by the fighting men of the remaining parts of Munster and of the two Galway districts of [i]Vi[i] Maine and [i]Vi[i] Fiachrach Aidne, areas that stretched from the Shannon to the headwaters of Galway Bay and lay adjacent to the homeland of the Dal Chais. These, since Brian was over seventy years of age and too old to lead them, were commanded by Brian's son. Murchad. Malachy's army of Meathmen was also in the field, but, as we shall see, was not engaged at Clontarf.

The Irish forces present at the battle were, as is apparent, drawn only from a limited part of the country. None hailed from the northern half of the island. It is clear, however, that by contemporary standards the opposing armies were big ones. We have no parade states to guide us. The Irish literary genius of the past ran neither to statistics nor to simple narrative; the writers were too busy weaving high drama from the loves and hates of Gormflath, or too active in pursuing endless genealogies to improbable beginnings, to have either the energy or the ability left to make plain statements of fact; and so there are no contem-porary pronouncements of strength. It has been reckoned that at the battle of Hastings, where the Normans won Britain in 1066, Harold's army may have been as low as 4,000 and Duke William's no bigger than 5,000. Since Clontarf was certainly not a bigger battle than Hastings, we may perhaps conclude that the total strength of both sides added together did not exceed 5,000 men. Even at that, the battle would have stood out as a great one of its age, a clash of the most powerful forces yet seen in Ireland. Where and how these armies fought are alike-thanks to the poor descriptive powers of the chroniclers-obscure. We know that the fight was in the district of Clontarf, at present represented by the Dublin suburb of that name; but we know nothing more. When the last man who could have pointed out the battlefield to his son died without doing so, it was forgotten. Now when we speak of Clontarf we can speak only in generalities. Sitric's overseas allies joined him in Dublin on Palm Sunday, 1014, or a little before that. The Leinster army came up about the same time. Their opponents, Malachy's and Murchad's men, soon appeared. Murchad's force, which was accompanied by Brian Boru, was less a detachment that had been sent off to raid Leinster behind Maelmora's back.

The Dublin area was enemy territory for both Munstermen and Meathmen, and they fell to plundering the rich district between the town and Howth on the north side of the river Liffey. To prevent further depredations, and judging it to be a favourable moment to show fight, Maelmora and his Norse allies marched against their enemies on the morning of Good Friday. They came out from the little town, crossed the Liffey and its tributary the Tolka, and entered the district of Clontarf. That the Norsemen and Leinstermen went this far, and that the battle took place east of the Tolka seem almost certain.

Somewhere beyond the reclaimed area of the present north side docks-where the Belfast trains run north-eastward out of Amiens Street station, cross the Howth Road, and gather speed above the tops of the houses-on flat ground within sight of Dublin, Brian's army under Murchad met their advancing enemies-Brian's army alone. Malachy's Meathmen, although they had co-operated with their Munster allies up to this, now stood aloof. Why? What sudden insult had been offered Malachy? Or perhaps he had, during all those years since he stood aside and saw Brian made High King in his place, dissembled a fierce hatred of his rival. Was this his revenge? Or, since in the end the Munstermen won without his aid, are we to believe that they did not need it now, and that they preferred to fight alone? We shall never know. This is a matter of personalities that the chroniclers have not explained.

The battle was a bloody struggle of men who fought on foot. From what we know of the warfare of the time we can visualise it as a clash of two lines of closely packed forces with the best men, the champions and leaders, in front and the meaner folk scrambling and pushing behind. There was then no science of war; there was no ability to manoeuvre, nor appreciation that more than blows was necessary for victory. Opponents were slung out in tightly packed lines of battle, their shields held close, one to the other, in long 'shield walls' from the slight shelter of which men hacked and stabbed at their enemies to the limit of their strength and courage. According to the Irish account of Clontarf and the events of the time which has been translated under the title [i]The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill[i], Brian's army was in a 'battle phalanx, compact, huge, disciplined', and the men stood so close together in the lines on either side as they faced one another that a four-horsed chariot could be driven on their heads from one flank to the other. The Norse Saga of Burnt Njal says that both armies were drawn up in battle array. Both records mention banners. It is claimed that the Irish had three score and ten of them, of many colours; the Saga says that the Norse banners were borne before their 'mid battle', or centre. These banners mayor may not have been flags. It is possible that they were, like Harold's standard as shown in the Bayeux Tapestry, actual figures of dragons, birds or other creatures.

Although the details are scanty, the evidence suggests a tripartite arrangement of forces that was common to both armies, an arrangement of centre, or main battle, and two wings; that is, the universal method of drawing up fighting forces that was in use down the centuries. The Norse chronicler, who omits the Leinstermen from his scheme, says that Sigurd led the 'mid battle', Brodar one wing and Sitric the other. Opposite these were Brian's grandson Turlough in the centre and two Norse allies of the Irish, Wolf the Quarrelsome and Ospak, one on either wing. The Irish accounts speak of three lines, one behind the other, on either side. On their side the Dal Chais were in front, the remainder of the Munstermen behind them, and the Connachtmen in a third formation, presumably behind that again. Brian's Norse allies, mentioned also by the Irish, were, according to this description, formed on a wing. The Irish say that their enemies placed Maelmora's overseas allies in front, the Dublinmen behind them, and the Leinstermen in a third line.

Once begun, the fighting was continued from high tide to high tide, through the day. It was a conflict that was 'wounding, noisy, bloody, crimsoned, terrible, fierce, quarrelsome' -the chroniclers, rising to the occasion, pile on the expletives. Hour by hour the warriors clashed and drew off to draw breath, to rest their arms, to rearrange their front-clashed and drew off, and then fell on again, swaying and stumbling. The wings, says the Saga, fell on one another, 'and there was a very hard fight'. Individuals were outstanding. Brodar 'went through the host of the foe and felled all the foremost that stood there', until he met Wolf, who struck him down three times and send him flying into the near-by wood of Tomar. Turlough, Brian's grandson, brought on a struggle around Sigurd's standard. He killed the standard-bearer, and when another man took up the banner 'there was again a hard fight'. He too was killed, 'and so on one after the other all who stood near him'. Sigurd called upon Thorstein, son of Hall of the Side, to bear the banner, but when he was about to take it Asmund the White cried, 'Don't bear the banner, for all they who bear it get their deathl' Then Sigurd called on Hrafn the Red, but his answer was 'Bear thine own devil thyselfl' Soon Sigurd, his banner under his cloak, was pierced through with a spear and killed. Much of this may be no more than the romance of the story-tellers and saga-men, the fictitious element intruded on the basic record of facts; but the predominance of individual champions over the rest, which was part of the warfare of the age, must be factual. The Norsemen, because of their superior armour and weapons, and because fighting was second nature to them, may in this way have had an advantage, man for man, over all but the best of their Irish opponents. They were well equipped. They wore byrnies, or mail shirts of interlinked iron rings, and carried circular shields, and their weapons were axes, swords, spears and bows. The short-hafted, wide-bladed axes, the weapons of the Viking galleys, could be grasped with both hands to add weight to their blows; they must have been as terrible in a melee on land as they were on shipboard in a sea fight. And the Norse were renowned swordsmen, with a mystic regard for their straight, broad-bladed, often beautifully omamented swords. The armoury of 'the terrible, nimble wolf-hounds of victorious Banba' was little different from that of their foes. The Irish too had swords and spears and carried shields with metal bosses. Their leaders wore crested helmets; some even bore the enemy's weapons, the 'Lochlann axes'. They do not seem to have had armour; the only garments of theirs which are mentioned are cloth ones. Neither side was well equipped with missile weapons. Although both had bows, neither the Norse nor the Irish were renowned archers. The Irish missile, then and later, was the casting spear, javelin, or dart. At Clontarf, says [i]The War of the Gaedhi/ with the Gaill[i], they had 'darts with variegated silken strings, thick set with bright, dazzling, shining nails, to be violently cast at the heroes of valour and bravery'. The string was the thong which was retained by the thrower to ensure retrieval of his missile; such throwing weapons were used by the Irish for centuries. Whatever advantage their armour and their tradition of fighting gave them, however, the Norsemen were outfought. As the day wore on 'the fight broke out throughout all the host'; every man was engaged. By evening the 'shield wall' in front of what was left of Sitric's men collapsed. Rout followed. The Norse and the Leinstermen, with their backs to the Tolka and the sea, were borne further backward by the pressure of the victors.

'They retreated to the sea like a herd of cows in heat, from sun, and from gadflies, and from insects, and they were pursued closely, rapidly and lightly; and the foreigners were drowned in great numbers in the sea'. The chroniclers supply the details; most of which, we must suspect, are imaginary. And in the midst of this victory Brian died. Before the batde a 'shieldburg' had been 'thrown round him', that is, he was left under guard behind his line. After the rout had commenced, and when most of the guard had gone off to join in the pursuit-the occasion of plunder-Brodar, the sea-rover, who had lurked through the later part of the day in the wood to which he had earlier fled, came forth. He saw 'that there were few men by the shieldburg', and, breaking through these, he forced his way to Brian and 'hewed at the king'. Although Clontarf was clouded by the death of Brian, Emperor of the Gael, and although it was followed by an era of strife that seems like the aftermath of a defeat, it was still-as a combat -a mighty victory, and was remembered as such throughout the Gaelic and the Norse world. To have overcome 'men of such hardihood that nothing can withstand them', men on whose mail shirts 'no steel would bite', was a proud achievement.

Taken from the Introduction to Irish Battles by G.A. Hayes-McCoy, published by Appletree Press.

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