early modern Ireland – Dr Darren McGettigan ~ Historian and Author

December 30, 2020

Good News ~ More Tutoring in 2021

All going well I should be doing some more tutoring (online!) in the School of History in UCD in early 2021. This time I will be a tutor on Professor Elva Johnston’s second year module Celts, Romans and Vikings. This era in history, particularly the Viking Age, has been a major interest of mine in recent years and it will be good to be able to keep up-to-date with these topics. I really enjoyed my tutoring in 2020 on Dr Marc Caball’s Environment and Migration in early modern Ireland module. I think as lecturer, tutor and students, we all made a big effort to do our best in a difficult and challenging environment.

Taking place right after the summer-time archaeological dig for the remains of Red Hugh O’Donnell in Spain, tutoring again in early modern Irish history (1500s to 1700s) has re-kindled my interest in my first major area of historical expertise. I used my time tutoring to research aspects of the history of wolves, wolfdogs and some other animals in early modern Ireland, as well as some of the major forested areas in which these creatures lived. The research went really well and I hope to publish a journal article of this work soon. I still have some references to chase up in libraries and archives which I have been unable to visit due to Covid 19 lockdowns.

It is hard to believe now that the world had not even heard of this virus a year ago and yet it has dominated our lives throughout 2020. Thankfully family and friends have gotten through this trying time safely and hopefully with the rollout of the Covid vaccines next year we can put this crisis behind us. Indeed it appears that it is the rapid development of the vaccines which is the real miracle of 2020. Hopefully my next blog will be written in a post-Covid world when I might be able to finally have that postponed book-launch! All the best, Darren

September 18, 2020September 18, 2020

Back Tutoring at UCD

Next week I am due back at UCD to do some tutoring in the School of History. I will be tutoring students on Dr Marc Caball’s Environment and Migration second year module which focuses on early modern Ireland (1500s-1700s). It is great to be back tutoring in UCD again and it is also great to be back working in early modern Irish history. This was my first area of specialisation when I began to study history seriously as a researcher and writer. The past few years have seen me focus on medieval Irish history. However, the surprising dig in search of the remains of Red Hugh O’Donnell which took place over the summer in Valladolid in Spain has sparked my renewed interest in my PhD research which led to my first book on Red Hugh O’Donnell which was published way back in 2005. Since then my research interests have changed a little. Although I am still very interested in early modern Co. Donegal, I find that my most recent research takes me to early modern Leinster and Munster, although I am still very much focused on the 1500s. Hopefully my renewed interest in early modern Irish history will contribute to making my forthcoming tutorials interesting and beneficial for my students. With the ongoing Covid 19 emergency tutoring for this semester anyway will be online but hopefully when the pandemic crisis has passed both students and staff will be able to look back on this strange time and say that we all tried our best and did a good job!

December 8, 2019December 8, 2019

Christmas in Early Modern Ireland

As promised I have now begun to transfer my Irish genealogy blog posts from my old website which is nearly ten years old now. I expect that this old website may not be online much longer as time passes and technology evolves. The first blog post that I have decided to transfer was a popular one I first wrote at Christmas-time 2011. This post deals with Christmas traditions in early modern Ireland – particularly a Christmas feast hosted by the O’Molloy chieftain, a Gaelic Irish lord from the Irish midlands, sometime towards the end of the Nine Years War c.1600-1602. The blog was quite popular at the time and given the time of year is a good choice I think, with which to begin the blog transfers. I hope to transfer most of the other blogs over the next few months.

When I posted earlier this week on my Facebook page that I would try and write a Christmas themed blog this week, one of my readers suggested that I write about the Christmas traditions of the Gaelic Irish around the year 1602. Unfortunately, it is sad to say that very few writers at the time recorded any cultural Christmas traditions of the ordinary people of the Gaelic lordships. Perhaps such evidence has survived and I just havn’t found it yet.

Some evidence of Christmas in Gaelic Ireland for the years 1600 to 1602, which was the time of the end of the Nine Years War (1594 – 1603), has survived however, in relation to the O’Molloy chieftain, Calvagh O’Molloy, who was the Gaelic lord of the territory of Fircall, a small Gaelic lordship in the Irish midlands, which is now part of the modern Irish county of Offaly. Calvagh O’Molloy became lord of Fircall in the spring of the year 1599 when his father, Conal O’Molloy, Lord of Fircall died. The Annals of the Four Masters record that Calvagh was appointed Lord of Fircall by Queen Elizabeth I, although ‘Some of the gentlemen of his tribe vied and contended with him (according to the custom of the Irish), for that name’.

Calvagh O’Molloy appears to have been a decent man, who tried to keep his lordship and family out of the major war being fought on the island of Ireland, between the English army of Queen Elizabeth and the forces of the Ulster chieftains, Hugh O’Neill, the lord of Tyrone, and Red Hugh O’Donnell, the lord of Tír Chonaill, who were determined to preserve their autonomy and perhaps drive English influence out of Ireland for good. However, try as he might, Calvagh O’Molloy could not keep the war out of Fircall. In the Spring of 1599, Hugh O’Neill sent his son Conn into the region ‘to ascertain who they were that were firm in their friendship and promises to O’Neill and the Irish’. One of O’Molloy’s neighbours, O’Carroll Lord of Ely treacherously killed a company of Hugh O’Neill’s mercenaries in the winter of 1599, which led Hugh O’Neill himself to march through Fircall in January 1600 on his famous expedition to Munster. Hugh O’Neill spent nine nights in the Fircall region and he did not leave until he had plundered Ely O’Carroll in revenge for his murdered soldiers and until ‘the people of Fircall, of Upper Leinster, and Westmeath, made full submission to him, and formed a league of friendship with him’. Later on in 1600 as the war turned against the Irish, the English army reconquered Laois and Offaly. However, war returned to Fircall in the winter of 1601 as Red Hugh O’Donnell passed through the territory on his epic march to Kinsale.

Not surprisingly all this warfare and the to-ing and fro-ing of so many opposing armies through the Fircall region had a terrible impact on the local population. One of the family, a Franciscan friar Francis O’Molloy, later wrote that ‘the kingdom of Ireland was devastated with famine, fire and sword, and in the utmost dearth of provisions, in Queen Elizabeth’s time’. However, Father O’Molloy also records that Calvagh O’Molloy, concerned for the welfare and possibly the very survival of his followers ‘invited to his house nine hundred and sixty persons for the feast of Christmas, entertained them there for the space of twleve days’. This was a remarkably generous deed by the O’Molloy chieftain, which was probably inspired by some of the famous ‘invitations’ issued by a number of prominent Gaelic Irish chieftains in late medieval times. O’Molloy’s Christmas feast was probably not unique in Gaelic Ireland during the Nine Years War but it is the only one that I am aware of. The feast I think illustrates the concern some Gaelic Irish chieftains had for the own family and followers and also their attitude to war and famine relief. However, Calvagh O’Molloy’s Christmas feast must have been unusually generous. A stanza of bardic poetry was also written to commemorate his very generous deed. Translated from Irish it reads:

‘Thrice three hundred and three score -Tale unheard by thee before – Feasted free in Calvagh’s hall – Caring light what might befall’.

Hope you enjoyed my Christmas blog. Have a great Christmas and New Years everyone.

November 26, 2019December 8, 2019

Surnames of the Cenél nEógain

My new book The Kings of Aileach and the Vikings, AD 800-1060 is due to be published by Four Courts Press in January 2020. While the main theme is Viking activity in the north of the island of Ireland, the Cenél nEógain dynasty, the dominant Irish population group in this region, is another. Many of the Cenél nEógain kings became high-kings of Ireland during the ninth and tenth centuries. A major discovery of my research was that the Cenél nEógain also had kings that were powerful at a local level, who administered the Cenél nEógain kingdom while their most able dynasts were either pursuing the business of the high-kingship or were striving hard to inherit this prestigious title. Claimants to the high-kingship were known as rígdamnae Érenn (one eligible to become high-king), while the local rulers usually bore the title king of Aileach. However, there were no hard and fast rules and a high-king of Ireland or one of the rígdamnae Érenn could also be king of Aileach. There were only two kingship rules among the early medieval Cenél nEógain. These appear to have been ‘once a king always a king’, and ‘succession of the collaterals’ – cousins often succeeded each other as kings of Aileach with sons rarely succeeding fathers. However, an able son of a prominent Cenél nEógain king usually got to the chance to become king himself, but only after the intervening reigns of one or two cousins.

An important part of my new book is also a study of the many branches and families that by the twelfth century went to make up the wider Cenél nEógain dynasty. Strictly speaking this aspect of the history of the Cenél nEógain came after the Viking Age was mostly over in medieval Ireland. However, I found that once surnames began to be used among the Cenél nEógain, which began during the tenth century (very early by Irish standards), that this helped to make much more sense of the geographical distribution of the branches of the dynasty and also of the lists of Cenél nEógain kings. In particular I took an interest in the families that made up the western Cenél nEógain during this period, located in the modern areas of Inishowen and the extreme east of Co. Donegal and also west Co. Derry and the very west of Co. Tyrone. The Cenél nEógain families of these areas went into decline during the thirteenth century and were largely forgotten in the history of late medieval and early modern Tyrone. Attached below is a piece that did not make it into my book about the O’Laverty family of west Tyrone. A prominent branch of the Cenél nEógain who provided kings of Aileach during the ninth century, the family experienced a resurgence of power and influence during the 1100 and 1200s. Then for some now unknown reason the power of the O’Laverty family collapsed and they became a minor family living in the Ardstraw region but no longer recorded in the Irish annals. The unused piece from my book contains my research into the origins of this family and also illustrates how complicated the genealogical history of the Cenél nEógain population group can be.

I hope readers will appreciate and understand the portions of this book that deal with the family divisions and surname development among the Cenél nEógain. Some of this material is from the twelfth century and does not strictly concern the Viking-Age in the north of Ireland. However, this book would not have been written but for my research into the medieval branches of the Cenél nEogain. It was my early research into the history of my own MacEiteagáin (McGettigan) family that sparked my interest in the Cenél nEógain in medieval times. Charlie Doherty in UCD suggested that I read Seamus Ó Ceallaigh’s Gleanings from Ulster History, although it took me a long time to figure out what may have been happening in the complex genealogical world of the early medieval Cenel nEógain. Charlie’s UCD colleague Professor F.J. Byrne, once astutely wrote that only a well-trained genealogist could make any sense of the many branches that had proliferated among the Cenél nEógain dynasty. While I do not make any claim to be an expert genealogist, I do believe that by this stage my knowledge of the many branches and surnames of the Cenél nEógain is quite good. Just to take one prominent example, the Ua Flaithbertaig (O’Laverty) surname, probably the third most senior family among the Cenél nEógain. Based in west Tyrone near Clady and Ardstraw, this distinguished family appears to be descended from Flaithbertach, a king of Aileach who died c.896, who was descended from the Cenél nEógain High-King of Ireland, Áed Oirdnide (d.819). Some genealogical collections give an alternative origin for the Ua Flaithbertaig family, with the ancestor figure being Áed Allán, another High-King of Ireland from the Cenél nEógain dynasty, who died in 743 AD. However, this genealogy may be a forgery which may have been commissioned by Ruaidhri Ua Flaithbertaig, a later king of Tyrone in 1186-7. There are also references in the Irish annals to an Ua Flaithbertaig family, lords of the Clann Domhnall branch of the Cenél nEógain (the descendants of Domnall Dabaill, d.915). This family may be descended from Flaithbertach (d.919) son of Domnall Dabaill, via his famous grandson Murchad Glúnillar (Eagle-knee), a king of Aileach who died in 974. However, it is just as likely that the Ua Flaithbertaig lords of Clann Domhnall were from the first family here discussed, who were located geographically close-by. Clann Domhnall may have become a territorial designation (Urney and Inchenny) in west Tyrone by the twelfth-century. There could have been three separate Ua Flaithbertaig families among the medieval Cenél nEógain, all of whom may have had distinguished ancestry. After my research I believe there was probably only one. To illustatrate how confusing the genealogical world of the early medieval Cenél nEógain can be the Clann Flaithbertaig branch of the dynasty were also located in the same area of the Cenél nEógain kingdom. However, they were a branch of the Clann Conchobair, descended from Flaithbertach, one of the many sons of Conchobar, an important ancestor figure among the Cenél nEógain who flourished in the mid-eighth century. The most prominent surnames of this branch of the Cenél nEógain were Ua Dubhda (Duddy) and Ua Baoighill (O’Boyle).