Northmen, The Viking Saga 793-1241 AD

Chapter 5: Dublin and Cashel. The Vikings in Ireland 795–1014

Few places suffered more at the hands of the Vikings than Ireland. For the best part of 200 years the Vikings systematically milked Ireland of its people to supply the slave trade, yet, for all their military success they failed to conquer and settle in any territory besides a few fortified coastal enclaves. This is the conundrum of Viking Age Ireland; it was a land that looked weak but was in reality strong and resilient.

Superficially, Ireland must have looked to the Vikings like an easy target. There is no doubt that in England and Francia internal divisions worked to the Vikings’ advantage, and if there, why not even more so in Ireland, which was the most divided country in western Europe? Early medieval Ireland was a complex mosaic of around 150 local kingdoms and a dozen over-kingdoms. The local kingdoms or túatha were usually very small – often less than 100 square miles with populations of only a few thousand – and were defined as a ‘people’ or ‘community’, rather than as territorial units. The people of a túath were, in theory at least, an extended kinship group, or clan, and the king was the head of the senior lineage. The king (rí túathe) was responsible to his people for the fertility of their land and cattle, hence their prosperity: this was a legacy of pagan times when a king who failed to deliver would be sacrificed to the gods. Kings also had duties of lawmaking, judgement and leadership in war. In return all the free families of the túath owed the king taxes (paid in kind) and military service. Local kings might themselves owe tribute (usually in cattle), hospitality and military service to an over-king (ruirí), who in turn might owe it to a high king (rí ruirech). Over-kings, therefore, did not exercise direct rule outside their own túath, their power rested upon their ability to call on the resources and services of their client kings. The most powerful over-king of the day might be described as High King of Ireland (rí Érenn), but this was not really a formal institution with defined rules of succession. The relationships between kingdoms were not fixed. A local king with military ability and ambition could build a strong war band and use it to make himself an over-king by forcing other local kings to become his tributaries. Nevertheless, by the eighth century some stable dynasties of over-kings had emerged, the most powerful of which were the Northern and Southern Uí Néill dynasties of north-east Ulster and Meath respectively. To an outsider, early medieval Ireland would have appeared to be a chaotic and deeply divided country and, indeed, small-scale warfare between its kingdoms was endemic. Yet this highly decentralised political structure was to prove incredibly resilient, well able to absorb the shock of Viking invasions and constantly renew resistance.

In contrast to England and Francia where the Danes dominated, these raids were mainly the work of Norwegians, sailing to Ireland via the Northern Isles and the Hebrides. Viking activity in Ireland developed at first in much the same way as it did in England and Francia, beginning with small-scale hit-and-run raids on exposed coastal monasteries gradually escalating until the Vikings founded permanent bases and became a year-round presence plundering and captive-taking across the whole country. The first recorded Viking raids in Ireland took place in 795 when the same Viking band that sacked Iona sacked a monastery on Rechru, which may either be Lambay Island north of Dublin, or Rathlin Island off the northern Irish coast. In the 830s, larger fleets, numbering around sixty ships, began to arrive. Once its island monasteries had been plundered, Ireland’s wild and mountainous west coast, so similar to the west coast of Scotland, was generally shunned by the Vikings because of its poverty. The Vikings concentrated their efforts on the more fertile and densely populated east coast and the great midland plain. In 836, a fleet sailed for the first time far inland along Ireland’s longest river, the Shannon, and sacked the wealthy monasteries of Clonmacnoise and Clonfert. The following year, a Viking fleet sailed from Donegal Bay into Lough Erne to plunder monasteries around its shores. Another sacked the monastery of Áth Cliath – on the site of modern Dublin – while a third army ravaged on the Boyne, and a fourth was on the Shannon again. Nowhere was safe: ‘the sea cast floods of foreigners into Ireland, so there was not a point thereof that was without a fleet’, wrote one chronicler.

Although the Irish often fought fiercely, the Vikings’ advantage of mobility meant that they often escaped unchallenged: the saints slept and did not protect their monasteries. Monks trembled in their cells and prayed for bad weather to keep the Vikings off the seas. As kings were rarely inclined to help their rivals, the Vikings often benefited from the divisions between the Irish kingdoms. Indeed, most kings took a thoroughly pragmatic view of the Vikings, treating them as just another element in their country’s complex political geography, often welcoming them as allies who could help weaken a rival kingdom. Some bands of Irishmen took advantage of the disorder created by the Vikings to go plundering themselves ‘in the manner of the heathens’. One such band was destroyed by Máel Sechnaill mac Máele Ruanaid (r. 845 – 62), the powerful Southern Uí Néill high king of Meath, in 847.

In 839 there was a step-change in Viking activity. A Viking fleet sailed up the River Bann into Lough Neagh. Instead of plundering and leaving, the Vikings built a fortified ship camp on the lakeshore, which they used as a base to plunder the heart of Ulster for three successive summers. This was the first of many such bases – known as longphuirt by the Irish – that Viking armies were to build in Ireland over the next few years as they intensified their raids. The foundation of the longphuirt subtly changed the dynamics of Viking activity in Ireland. The Vikings were now a permanent presence in Ireland and could raid all year round, but at the same time, they lost some of their mobility, making them more vulnerable to Irish counterattack.

The leader of the fleet on Lough Neagh was a warlord who the Irish called Turgeis, that is probably Thórgestr or Thórgils in Old Norse. Turgeis’ origins are not known, but he may have come from the Hebrides as he had as his allies the Gall-Gaedhil, those ‘foreign Gaels’ who were the product of marriages between Norse settlers and the local Gaelic-speaking population. Turgeis’ greatest coup was plundering St Patrick’s monastery at Armagh three times in 840: after his final attack he burned it down for good measure. Armagh was an especially rich prize; apart from its precious reliquaries and sacred vessels, many Irish kings had their royal treasuries there, hoping that they would enjoy the protection of its powerful patron saint. It would not only have been monks who suffered in these attacks. Armagh was surrounded by a small town of craftsmen, merchants, estate managers and others who serviced the needs of this most prestigious of all Irish ecclesiastical centres. Turgeis’ activities are uncertain for the next few years, but he is thought by some historians to have been the leader of the Vikings who in 841 founded what would become the most successful of all the longphuirt at Dublin. In 844, Turgeis led his fleet up the River Shannon as far as Lough Ree, where he built another longphort from which he plundered widely in the midlands. The following year, in the first serious reverse suffered by the Vikings in Ireland, he was captured by Máel Sechnaill, who drowned him in Lough Owel in County Westmeath.

Turgeis’ reputation grew with the telling and after his death he became a symbol of everything that was wicked about the Vikings. In the colourful but unreliable twelfth-century history of Ireland’s Viking wars, Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh (‘The War of the Irish with the Foreigners’), Turgeis has become the king of all the Vikings in Ireland, bent on conquering the whole island. This Turgeis is a militant pagan who expels the abbot from Armagh and sets himself up as a pagan high priest. His wife Ota (probably Auðr) is just as bad, performing acts of witchcraft on the altar of the abbey at Clonmacnoise. This story might not be wholly improbable as Ota may have been a völva, a Viking seeress with powers to predict the future. According to the Welsh churchman Gerald of Wales, who travelled in Ireland during the 1180s, Turgeis actually conquered Ireland but was lured to his death by his weakness for women. Turgeis took a fancy to Máel Sechnaill’s daughter. The king, ‘hiding his hatred in his heart’, agreed to hand her over to Turgeis on an island in Lough Owel along with fifteen other beautiful girls. Turgeis was delighted and went to the rendezvous with fifteen of his leading warriors, all of them expecting amorous encounters. But Máel Sechnaill had laid a trap for them. His daughter was waiting for Turgeis on the island not with fifteen girls but with fifteen hand-picked young men, all clean shaven and dressed in women’s clothing, under which they carried knives. Turgeis and his unsuspecting warriors were stabbed to death ‘in the midst of their embraces’. Gerald probably recorded the story not to flatter the Irish for their cunning but because it chimed comfortably with his own prejudices: he regarded the Irish as a thoroughly deceitful and untrustworthy bunch who always negotiated in bad faith.

More reverses for the Vikings followed. In 848 the Irish won four major battles against the Vikings, killing over 2,000 of them in the process, according the Annals of Ulster. Irish annalists described these battle casualties as ‘heads’: Irish warriors still practiced the ancient Celtic custom of taking enemy heads as war trophies and rarely took prisoners. Then, in 849, Máel Sechnaill captured and plundered Dublin. Discouraged by their defeats, many Vikings left to seek easier pickings in Francia. The Norwegians suffered another blow in 851when a large force of Danish Vikings expelled them from Dublin. The following year the Norwegians suffered another crushing defeat by the Danes in a three-day battle at Carlingford Lough in County Down. The Danish intervention in Ireland was short-lived. In 853 two brothers, Olaf and Ivar, recaptured Dublin for the Norwegians and expelled the Danes.

The arrival of Olaf and Ivar at Dublin in 853 was a decisive moment in Ireland’s Viking Age. Olaf and Ivar (who are called Amláib and Ímhar in Irish annals) became the first kings of Dublin and under their rule it developed from a rough ship-camp into the dominant Viking power centre of the whole Irish Sea area. Irish sources describe Olaf and Ivar as sons of King Gofraid of Lochlann, which is the usual Gaelic name for Norway, but their origins remain uncertain. Most modern historians identify Olaf with Olaf the White, a king of Dublin who features in Icelandic saga traditions. Attempts to identify Ivar with the legendary Viking Ivar the Boneless are unconvincing: Ivar the Boneless’s father was the equally legendary Viking Ragnar Lodbrok who, if he existed at all, was most likely a Dane. What is more certain is that the descendants of Olaf and Ivar, known to the Irish as the Uí Ímair, would dominate the Irish Sea for the next 200 years.

There is not enough evidence about the careers of Turgeis and Tomrair to be sure of their motives: did they aspire to found Viking states in Ireland or were they really just out for the plunder? It is clear, however, that Olaf and Ivar were trying to create a kingdom for themselves because their first actions were to impose tribute on all the Viking armies operating in Ireland. It is hard to work out from the Irish annals exactly how many of these there were but there must have been at least three or four. In their efforts to build a secure power base, the brothers took full advantage of the complex political rivalries of the Irish kingdoms. In 859 Olaf and Ivar allied with Cerball mac Dúnlainge (r. 842 – 880), king of Osraige, against his overlord Máel Sechnaill. According to saga traditions, the alliance was sealed by a marriage between Olaf and one of Cerball’s daughters. A Christian king is unlikely to have married his daughters to pagans, so, if the tradition is true, it is likely that Olaf had at least been baptised. In 858, Ivar and Cerball campaigned together in Leinster, and in Munster against the Gall-Gaedhil. The next year Olaf, Ivar and Cerball together invaded Máel Sechnaill’s kingdom of Meath. After Cerball came to terms with Máel Sechnaill, he dropped his Norse allies. Olaf and Ivar soon found a new ally in Áed Finnliath (c. 855 – 79), the northern Uí Néill king of Ulster. Together they plundered Máel Sechnaill’s kingdom in 861 and 862. After Máel Sechnaill’s death in 862, Olaf and Ivar switched to supporting his successor Lorcán against Áed. The brothers did Lorcán’s standing no good at all when, in 863, they dug open the great Neolithic burial mounds at Knowth on the River Boyne to look for treasure. Although pagan in origin, these ancient mounds were rich in mythological significance for the Irish and this desecration was thought to be shocking behaviour even by the Viking’s low standards. The following year Áed captured the discredited Lorcán, blinded him and forced him to abdicate.

Olaf and his brothers had now run out of willing allies in Ireland and, in 866, they took their fleet across the Irish Sea to raid Pictland in alliance with the Gall-Gaedhil. Áed, now high king, took advantage of their absence to plunder and destroy all the Viking longphuirt in Ulster. After a victory over the Vikings on Lough Foyle, Áed took 240 heads home as trophies. The limited extent of Viking territorial control was starkly demonstrated in 867 when Áed’s ally Cennétig king of Loigis, destroyed Olaf’s border fortress at Clondalkin just 5 miles from Dublin, which he then went on to plunder. Olaf now allied with the southern Uí Néill and Leinster against Áed. Áed crushed the alliance at the Battle of Killineer (Co. Louth) in 868: among the dead was one of Olaf’s sons. Olaf struck back at Áed in 869, brutally sacking Armagh and leading off 1,000 captives for the slave markets. This was a severe blow to Áed’s prestige – he was supposed to be the monastery’s protector. After this success, Olaf and Ivar crossed the Irish Sea to Strathclyde and laid siege to its capital, Alt Clut, on the summit of Dumbarton Rock, overlooking the River Clyde. Alt Clut fell after four months and the brothers returned to Dublin with a hoard of treasure. They went back to Strathclyde for more the following year and this time returned ‘with a great prey of Angles, Britons and Picts’. Olaf and Ivar were back plundering in Meath in 872, but in the next year Ivar died of ‘a sudden, horrible disease’. Olaf survived until 874 or 875: he was killed in battle with Constantine I of Scotland at Dollar in Clackmannanshire.

The deaths of Ivar and Olaf began what the Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh dubbed the ‘Forty Years’ Rest’, a long period of reduced Viking activity in Ireland that lasted until 914. Deprived of the strong military leadership provided by Olaf and Ivar, Dublin became politically unstable under a succession of short-lived successors. Olaf’s first successor as king of Dublin, his son Oystín (Eystein), lasted barely a year: he was killed when Dublin was captured by a Danish Viking who Irish annalists called Alband. Alband is most likely to have been Halfdan, the Danish king of York. Áed Finnliath came to the rescue of his Viking allies, quickly expelling Alband and placing Ivar’s son Bárðr on the throne. Alband returned to Ireland in 877, but was killed fighting the Dublin Vikings at Strangford Lough. However, his dream of uniting Dublin and York into a trans-Irish Sea kingdom survived. Bárðr died in 881 and was followed by six short-lived kings, none of whom was able to arrest the kingdom’s decline. In 902, Cerball mac Muirecáin, king of Leinster and Máel Finnia of Brega launched a co-ordinated pincer attack on Dublin from the north and south, forcing the Norse to flee for their ships after a fierce battle. The refugees fled mainly to North Wales and north-west England. Ireland’s first Viking Age was over.

Most of the Vikings’ longphuirt were either abandoned, or were destroyed by the Irish, after relatively short periods of occupation. Dublin was one of a small group of longphuirt, which also included Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Limerick, which developed into permanent towns. These longphuirt all had in common good tidal harbours. The exact location of the original Viking longphort at Dublin now lies buried beneath later buildings. This has necessarily limited archaeological investigation of the city’s origins to rescue excavations on sites that have been temporarily cleared for redevelopment. Evidence for early Viking occupation, including warrior burials, buildings, ship rivets and a possible defensive rampart, excavated from sites at Ship Street Great and South Great George’s Street, suggest that the longphort was probably in the area where Dublin Castle now stands, close to the Dubhlinn, the ‘black pool’ from which the city got its English name. This was a now-vanished tidal pool at the confluence of the River Liffey and its small tributary the Poddle. Dublin was already a place of some importance before the longphort was built as a monastic centre and the site of the lowest ford across the River Liffey: its Gaelic name Áth Cliath means ‘the ford of the hurdles’. This ford made Dublin a natural focus of overland routes and, with its good harbour and short sailing distances to Wales, north-west England, Galloway and the Isle of Man, it was ideally situated to become a successful port and trading centre. The same geographical advantages also made Dublin an ideal base for raiding, not only in eastern Ireland but around the whole Irish Sea region. No other longphort in Ireland had the same combination of advantages: it was almost inevitable that Dublin would become Ireland’s dominant Viking centre.

Early Dublin was probably similar to the well-preserved longphort at Linn Duchaill, about 40 miles further north, near the village of Annagassan in County Louth. Founded in the same year as Dublin, this longphort was built on the site of a minor monastery on the banks of the River Glyde, close to its estuary into the Irish Sea. The Vikings occupied the longphort until 891, when the Irish expelled them. Vikings reoccupied the site c. 914 only for it to be abandoned for good in 927. The site has been open farmland ever since so, unlike Dublin, this longphort’s remains have seen little disturbance. Covering about 40 acres (16 hectares), the longphort at Linn Duachaill was large enough to accommodate an army that was several thousand strong. A rampart and ditch, ¾ of a mile long, protected the landward side of the fort and there was a small citadel on higher ground within the fort. Excavations yielded large numbers of ships’ rivets, testifying to ship repair and perhaps shipbuilding on the site. Pieces of hacksilver and the remains of scales show that loot was divided up here and an iron slave chain dredged from the river is evidence of slave raiding. A shuttle and spindle whorl provide evidence of spinning and weaving in the fort. As these were not occupations for Viking warriors, women must have lived there. Geophysical surveys suggest that the waterfront was densely built-up but this has not yet been confirmed by excavations. Linn Duachaill did not have the good harbour that Dublin had, and it was that which probably prevented it ever developing into a permanent town.

Archaeological evidence indicates that by 902 Dublin had begun to outgrow the longphort and become a true town rather than an armed camp. Significantly, following the Irish conquest in that year, Dublin was not abandoned: there is clear evidence of continuity of settlement through to its recapture by the Norse in 917. That there was an exodus of Scandinavians from Ireland at that time is not in doubt, so this is probably evidence that Dublin had a significant Irish population living alongside the Norse and that they were allowed to remain: they may even have been the majority because genetic studies have found scant evidence of Scandinavian DNA in the modern Irish population.

Dublin owed its transformation to a town to trade. Pre-Viking Ireland did not play a large part in international trade so it had no trading towns to compare with the likes of Dorestad or York. Coinage was not used either. Ireland was not poor, however. The hoards of magnificent gold and silver liturgical vessels from Ardagh and Derrynaflan stand testimony to the wealth of Ireland’s monasteries in the early Middle Ages. Major Irish monasteries like Armagh or Clonmacnoise were much more than communities of monks, they were also centres of political power and economic activity. Secular communities of craftsmen and merchants grew up around the more important monasteries and by the eighth century a few were becoming small towns. Kings, seeking the authority and safety that close association with the saints was believed to confer, often had residences, treasuries and garrisons in these monastic towns. All of this was more than enough to justify the Vikings’ attentions, but their main interest was in Ireland’s people.

Crude estimates based on a count of known settlements suggest that Ireland’s population was about half a million when the Viking Age began. Thanks to the country’s mild winters, cool summers and reliable rainfall, grass grew all year round so cattle and sheep did not have to be kept inside during the winter. The Irish did not bother to gather hay in the summer as it was so rarely necessary. Despite occasional famines caused by cattle epidemics and severe weather, the Irish population was generally well nourished and very few people were desperately poor. The Vikings rounded up these people in their thousands to be ransomed or sold as slaves according to their wealth and status. Slavery was rare in pre-Viking Ireland – it was used mainly as a form of debt bondage – so there was no slave trade. Plundering in wars between the Irish was usually confined to cattle rustling, so Viking slaving added a new form of suffering to the experience of warfare. Perhaps inevitably, Irish kings soon began to take captives during their wars and sell them to the Vikings. Irish captives who were not lucky enough to be ransomed by their relatives could expect to be sold abroad. Anglo-Saxon England and the Frankish kingdoms both had active slave trades but most Irish captives probably finished up in Scandinavia or the Moorish kingdoms in Spain and North Africa. Through developing the slave trade, the Vikings drew Ireland into fuller participation in the international trade networks. This is usually presented as one of the positive impacts that the Vikings had on Ireland, but it is unlikely that their victims were quite so sanguine about it.

We know enough about the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade of the eighteenth century to guess at the human misery Viking slaving must have caused. Its economic impact is harder to estimate but it is likely that Vikings targeted the young and healthy rather than infants and the elderly. The kidnapping and breaking-up of communities of learned monks must have had a far more serious impact on Ireland’s flourishing monastic culture than ever the destruction of books, sacred vessels and buildings did. As mere commodities, the voices of slaves are rarely heard in the historical record, but two remarkable accounts have survived about the experiences of Irishmen who were captured by Viking slavers. One relates to a Leinsterman called Findan whose sister was captured by Viking raiders some time around the middle of the ninth century. Findan’s father sent him to the Vikings to arrange his sister’s ransom, but they immediately clapped him in irons and carried him off to their ship too. After keeping him without food and water for two days, the Vikings discussed what to do with him. Luckily, his captors decided that it was wrong to capture people who had come to pay ransom, no doubt because it would discourage others from doing so, and they let him, and presumably his sister, go. A short time afterwards Findan got caught up in another Viking raid but evaded capture by hiding behind the door of a hut. For Findan it was third time unlucky, because in his next encounter with the Vikings he was taken prisoner and sold into slavery. After changing hands several times, Findan finished up on a ship bound for Scandinavia. Findan gained his owner’s confidence by helping the crew fight off some pirates and he was released from his leg irons. When his owner made a stop-over in Orkney, Findan seized the opportunity to jump ship and escape. Findan eventually made his way to Rome as a pilgrim and ended his life as a monk at the monastery of Rheinau in Switzerland: one of his fellow monks recorded his life story shortly after he died.

The second story concerns an Irishman called Murchad, a married man with a daughter, who was captured by Vikings and taken to Northumbria, where he was sold as a slave to a nunnery, with comical consequences. After he had seduced several of the nuns and turned the nunnery into a brothel, Murchad was expelled and cast adrift on the sea in a boat without oars or a sail as a punishment for his impiety. Murchad was rescued by Vikings, who took him to Germany and sold him to a roguish widow, who paid for him with counterfeit money. Murchad seduced her too, of course. After many more adventures, Murchad eventually returned to Ireland, was reunited with his family, and took up a career teaching Latin grammar. How much real history there is in this tale is hard to tell; perhaps it is really about making the best of hard times. It is unlikely that many captives were as lucky as Findan and Murchad but neither is it likely that all came to bad ends: most of the thousands of Irish slaves who were taken to Iceland later in the ninth century were eventually freed and became tenant farmers, for example.

By the early tenth century, Vikings had conquered and colonised substantial parts of England, Scotland and Francia, as well as the uninhabited Faeroe Islands and Iceland. Yet for all the fury of their onslaught, in Ireland the Vikings had not even been able to retain a toehold. Appearances can be deceptive. Ireland’s divisions might have been a handicap in combating plundering raids but they also made it all but impossible for the Vikings to conquer and hold territory. On the face of it, it would have seemed that Ireland’s disunity should have made it more vulnerable to conquest by the Vikings than England, which was divided into only four powerful centralised kingdoms. In fact the opposite was true. In early medieval Europe it was always the centralised kingdoms that got conquered most easily. After the ‘Great Army’ of Danish Vikings invaded England in 865, the kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia both collapsed as soon as their kings had been killed in battle. Mercia too collapsed when its king decided he would prefer not to get killed and fled the country. Only Wessex survived to prevent England becoming Daneland. The centralised nature of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms meant that it was relatively easy for the Vikings to destroy the small ruling class and take over; just one battle might do the trick, as it did, more or less, in 1066. Little trouble would then be expected from the leaderless peasantry. Ireland, however, had dozens of kings and even more lineages from which new kings could be chosen. No victory, therefore, could ever have the decisive knockout effect it could in a country like England. Nor was there much chance of a lasting peace agreement with so many kings to negotiate with because what one agreed was not binding on the others.

The military resources of the Irish should not be underestimated either. Most Irish local kingdoms could raise armies of around 300 men. This was inadequate to deal with anything but a small Viking raiding party, but there were a great many local kingdoms. Local kings owed military service to their over-kings, so an over-king who could enforce the obedience of his vassals could raise a very large army indeed. However, in a clash of shield walls an Irish warrior was no match for a well-equipped Viking. The Irish fought almost naked without armour or iron helmets, armed with spears and using only bucklers (small round shields) for protection. The Irish recognised the superiority of the Viking warrior and they usually avoided formal battle in favour of irregular tactics, harassing raiding parties and wearing them down with sudden ambushes before melting away into the woods and bogs. In this kind of fighting, their lack of armour was an advantage to the Irish, making them more agile than a mail-clad Viking. A weary Viking raiding party returning home burdened with loot, captives and stolen cattle would have been particularly vulnerable to these tactics.

The Irish countryside was scattered with as many as 50,000 ringforts, but these were probably less of a hindrance to Viking raiders than Ireland’s warriors. Ringforts varied in size according to the status of their inhabitants. An over-king might have a substantial stone structure like the Grianán of Aileach in Donegal, a stronghold of the Northern Uí Néill dynasty. Built in the eighth century, the Grianán’s 15 foot (4.5 m) thick stone walls enclose an area 75 feet (23 m) in diameter. But although it is an impressive structure, modern experiments have shown that it would not have been at all easy to defend so it may have been built mainly as a ceremonial centre rather than to withstand a siege. Local kings and aristocrats had more modest forts, sometimes as little as 30 feet (9 m) in diameter, with earth ramparts and a palisade, containing its owner’s house and ancillary buildings. The ramparts of these small forts were primarily markers of status, for they were barely adequate for keeping livestock in, never mind keeping raiders out. More secure were crannogs, high status dwellings built on artificial islands in the middle of lakes. Communal fortifications like the English burhs, intended to provide refuges for the general population, were unknown.

During the course of the Viking Age, monks began to provide their monasteries with tall, slender, stone round towers. These were primarily used as bell towers and treasuries but they were also refuges against Viking raids. Over eighty round towers are known to have been built: the tallest surviving round tower, at Kilmacduagh in Galway, is 113 feet (34.5 m) tall. The towers’ entrances were set well above ground level so that they could only be entered with a ladder. The entrances of some towers show signs of fire damage, which is likely a result of Viking attacks. Having no source of water, or battlements from which to fight off attackers, round towers could not withstand a long siege but a small Viking raiding party could not really afford any delay.

During Ireland’s ‘Forty Years’ Rest’, the bulk of Viking forces were busying themselves plundering England and Francia. By the first decade of the tenth century, the English and Franks were finally getting the measure of the Vikings so Ireland once more began to look attractive to them. In 914 Ragnald, a grandson of Ivar I, appeared in the Irish Sea and defeated a rival Viking leader in a sea battle off the coast of the Isle of Man before going to set up a longphort at Waterford in south-east Ireland. The Vikings were back and with a vengeance. In 917, Ragnald’s brother Sihtric Cáech (‘squinty’) recaptured Dublin and in 919 smashed an Irish counter-attack at Islandbridge, killing the Úi Néill High King Niall Glúndubh and five other kings. In 922, Tomar mac Ailche (Thormódr Helgason) re-established Viking occupation at Limerick and around the same time other Viking leaders established themselves at Cork and Wexford. As was the case in the ninth century, the Vikings made no extensive territorial conquests or settlements outside their heavily fortified towns. Dublin came to control the most extensive territory: known as Dyflinnarskíri or ‘Dublinshire’, it extended along the coast from Wicklow (Vikinglo) in the south to Skerries (from Old Norse sker meaning a ‘reef’) in the north, and as far inland as Leixlip (Old Norse lax hlaup meaning ‘salmon leap’) on the River Liffey. A dearth of Norse place-names in the countryside of Dublinshire supports the conclusion that there was little or no Viking settlement outside Dublin and its immediate environs.

The history of the revived Viking kingdom of Dublin is frequently entangled with that of the Viking kingdom of York across the Irish Sea. While the Norse had been exiled from Ireland, Ragnald had briefly held power in York and now he wanted it back. Using Dublin as a base to campaign in northern England, Ragnald recaptured York in 919. York must have seemed a greater prize than Dublin because when Ragnald died in 921, Sihtric gave up the kingship of Dublin to another brother, Guthfrith, and took up the kingship of York. An aggressive ruler, Guthfrith immediately launched a furious campaign of plundering and slaving raids against the Irish, culminating in a curiously respectful sack of Armagh in November. Guthfrith spared the monks, the sick and the monastic buildings, ‘save for a few dwellings which were burned through carelessness.’ It may be that Guthfrith was a Christian. If so, Guthfrith’s show of respect for St Patrick did him no good because he was intercepted on his way home by Muirchertach of the Leather Cloaks (r. 919 – 43), the king of the Northern Uí Néill, and heavily defeated. This set the tone for Ireland’s second Viking Age: the days when Vikings might criss-cross Ireland without meeting serious opposition were gone. Muirchertach won another victory over the Dublin Vikings at Carlingford Lough in 925, when 200 of them were captured and beheaded, and the following year he killed Guthfrith’s son Alpthann (Halfdan) in another battle at Linn Duchaill. Muirchertach besieged the survivors in the longphort there until Guthfrith brought an army north from Dublin to rescue them. The longphort was afterwards permanently abandoned.

What had changed since Ireland’s first Viking Age? The shock of Viking raiding had forced change upon the Irish. Irish society became increasingly militarised and those kings who offered the most effective military leadership against the Vikings enhanced their status and power and, as they tightened their grip over their sub-kings, they could raise larger armies and enhance their power even more. It was the same virtuous circle of success that was driving political centralisation and state formation in contemporary Scandinavia. Irish kingship was gradually becoming more territorial and many local kings found themselves reduced to the status of local chieftains. At the same time, the Irish had learned from the Vikings, making greater use of swords and axes in battle. Though they still lacked armour, this went some way to evening the odds on the battlefield. War was also waged with a new ruthlessness, against both the Vikings and other Irish kingdoms. Ravaging and burning had been rare before the Viking Age, but now Irish kings used it routinely as a weapon against their foes irrespective of whether they were Irish or Norse.

After Sihtric’s death in 927, Guthfrith went to York, whether to claim the throne for himself or to support his brother’s son Olaf Cuarán is not known. Both were quickly expelled by Æthelstan of Wessex. Guthfrith returned to lay siege to York, but was forced to surrender to Æthelstan, who allowed him to return to Dublin, which he ruled until his death in 934. Guthfrith’s son and successor, Olaf Guthfrithsson, established dominance over all the Norse in Ireland when he defeated the Limerick Vikings in a naval battle on Lough Ree in 937. It was in the same year that he allied with the Scots and the Welsh of Strathclyde in another attempt to win the kingdom of York only to be defeated by Æthelstan at the Battle of Brunanburh (see p. 124). Muirchertach sacked Dublin the following year, taking advantage of its weakness after Olaf’s defeat in England. However, Æthelstan’s death in 939 finally gave Olaf the chance to seize York and unite it with Dublin in a single kingdom. Olaf did not enjoy his success for long: he died shortly after raiding the Northumbrian monasteries at Tyninghame and Auldhame in 941, a victim, it was said, of divine displeasure. A tenth-century Viking burial discovered in the monastic cemetery at Auldhame almost certainly belongs to a high-status Viking who was involved in these raids. It has been speculated that the burial was even that of Olaf himself. As Olaf was married to the daughter of King Constantine II of Scotland he must have been at least a nominal Christian. The king might therefore have been buried on consecrated ground as a posthumous act of penance. Following Olaf’s death his cousin Olaf Cuarán became king of York, while his brother Blácaire succeeded him at Dublin.

Blácaire was an active raider. On 26 February 943 he defeated and killed Muirchertach at the Battle of Glas Liatháin and five days later sacked Armagh. Muirchertach’s death was mourned by the Irish, the Annals of Ulster described him as ‘the Hector of the western world’ and lamented that his death had left the ‘land of the Irish orphaned’. Irish retaliation was swift. The following year, the newly acknowledged High King Congalach Cnogba captured and burned Dublin, carrying away a vast amount of booty. Four hundred Vikings were said to have been killed in the fighting and Blácaire fled into exile. In his absence, Congalach installed Olaf Cuarán, recently expelled from York by the English, as king of Dublin. Olaf’s dependence on Congalach was such that when the pair were defeated by a rival for the high kingship in 947, Blácaire was able to depose him and reclaim his throne. After his death in battle against Congalach in 948, Blácaire was succeeded by his cousin Godfred, another son of Sihtric Cáech. In 951 Godfred led an enormously successful expedition in the Irish midlands, plundering half a dozen monasteries including Kells. According to the Annals of Ulster, ‘three thousand men or more were taken captive and a great spoil of cattle and horses and gold and silver was taken away’. Divine vengeance followed swiftly, of course. A severe epidemic, described in the annals as dysentery and leprosy, broke out in Dublin on Godfred’s return and the king was one of its victims.

While Godfred had been plundering in Ireland his brother Olaf had briefly regained control of York before being expelled by the Norwegian Erik Bloodaxe in 952. Olaf now succeeded as king of Dublin but the dream of uniting Dublin and York was dead. The Dublin Vikings would never be a power in England again. It is doubtful that a Dublin-York axis was ever really viable in the long term. York is much more remote from Dublin than a casual glance at a map would suggest. As York could only be reached by ship from the North Sea, sailing there from Dublin involved a long, dangerous and time-consuming voyage around the north of Britain. The only alternative would have been to sail from Dublin to north-west England and then trek across the Pennine Hills to York. However, it is far from clear how much, if any, control the kings of York actually exercised west of the Pennines. And, fighting off the English and the Irish at the same time must have been way beyond the resources of the Dublin Vikings.

Olaf was not a peaceable king but neither was he a traditional freebooting Viking, as he rarely raided unless he was acting in alliance with an Irish king. Olaf was also closely linked to Irish dynasties by marriage – made possible by his baptism in England as part of a peace deal with king Edmund in 943. Olaf’s first wife was Dúnlaith, the sister of the high king Domnall ua Néill (r. 956 – 80) and, after her death, he married Gormflaith, daughter of Murchad mac Finn, king of Leinster. Olaf seems to have gained little, if any, political advantage from his marriages because his reign was dominated by conflicts with Domnall and with successive kings of Leinster (some of whom Olaf held hostage in Dublin). On Domnall’s death in 980, Dúnlaith’s son by an earlier marriage, Máel Sechnaill mac Domnall, the king of Meath, succeeded his uncle as high king. Máel Sechnaill clearly had no love lost for his stepfather as he had begun his reign as king of Meath in 975 with an attack on Dublin, in which he burned ‘Thor’s Wood’ (a pagan sacred grove) outside the city. Shortly after becoming high king, Máel Sechnaill heavily defeated a force of Vikings from Dublin, Man and the Hebrides in battle at the Hill of Tara, the traditional inauguration place of the high kings. Máel Sechnaill followed up his victory by laying siege to Dublin, which surrendered after three days. Máel Sechnaill imposed a heavy tribute on the citizens and deposed Olaf, who went into retirement as a monk on Iona, where he died soon afterwards. In his place, Máel Sechnaill appointed his half-brother Jarnkné (‘iron knee’) (r. 980 – 9), Olaf’s son by Dúnlaith, as tributary king. There was no disguising Dublin’s loss of independence.

One side effect of the strength of Irish resistance was to increase Viking interest in Wales. At its closest points, Wales was only a day’s sail away from Dublin, Waterford and Wexford, and from the Viking colony in the Isle of Man, but despite this had so far suffered relatively little from Viking raids. A combination of strong military rulers such as Rhodri Mawr (r. 844 – 78) of Gwynedd, difficult mountainous terrain, and Wales’ poverty compared to England, Ireland and Francia, seem to have deterred any major Viking invasions in the ninth century. Only a dozen Viking raids are recorded in the period 793 – 920, compared to over 130 in Ireland in the same period. This was fewer than the number of English invasions of Wales in the same period. Place-name evidence points to areas of Viking settlement in the south-west, in Pembrokeshire and Gower, but, as they are undocumented, it is not known when they were made. There was also a small area of Viking settlement in the far north-east, modern Flintshire, most probably by refugees from Dublin following its capture by the Irish in 902. This was probably overspill from the successful Viking colony a few miles away across the estuary of the River Dee in Wirral (see p. 71).

In the first half of the tenth century, Wales was dominated by Hywel Dda (r. 915-50), the king of Deheubarth in the south-west. During his long reign Hywel came close to uniting all of Wales under his rule but his death in 950 was followed by a civil war and the break-up of his dominion. This was a signal to Vikings based in Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Hebrides to launch a wave of attacks on Wales. The area most exposed to Viking raiding was the large and fertile island of Anglesey off the coast of North Wales, which lay only 70 miles due east of Dublin and just 45 miles south of the Isle of Man: raids are recorded in 961, 971, 972, 979, 980, 987 and 993. Another place hit hard was St David’s monastery on the Pembrokeshire coast, Wales’ most important ecclesiastical centre. Founded c. 500 by St David, the monastery became the seat of the archbishops of Wales in 519. Only 60 miles from Wexford, St David’s was first sacked by Vikings in 967, then again in 982, 988 and 998, when they killed archbishop Morgeneu. St David’s would be sacked at least another six times before the end of the eleventh century. In 989 the raids had become so bad that King Maredudd of Deheubarth paid tribute to the Vikings at the rate of one silver penny for each of his subjects. Viking raids declined quickly after 1000, perhaps because the Viking towns in Ireland had come under the control of Irish rulers, but raids from the Hebrides and Orkney continued into the twelfth century. Vikings from Ireland also continued to come to Wales, but they did so mainly as mercenaries signing on with Welsh kings to fight in their wars with one another and with the English.

The end of Ireland’s Viking Age is traditionally associated with the rise of the O’Brien (Ua Briain) dynasty of Munster, and of its greatest king Brian Boru (r. 976 – 1014) in particular. Brian’s career certainly had an epic quality about it. Brian was a younger son of Cennétig mac Lorcáin (d. 951), king of the Dál Cais, whose kingdom, which was roughly equivalent to modern County Clare, was subject to the kings of Munster. As a younger son Brian probably never expected to rule and his early life was spent in the shadow of his elder brother Mathgamain. Even Brian’s date of birth is uncertain. Some Irish sources claim that he was eighty-eight when he died in 1014, which would mean he was born in 926 or 927, but other sources give dates as early as 923 and as late as 942. Brian’s first experience of war came in 967 when he fought alongside his brother at the Battle of Sulcoit against Ivar, king of the Limerick Vikings. The following year the brothers captured and sacked Limerick, executing all male prisoners of fighting age. The rest were sold as slaves. Ivar, however, escaped to Britain and in 969 he returned with a new fleet and regained control of Limerick only to be expelled again by the Dal Cais in 972.

Probably in 970, Mathgamain expelled his nominal overlord, Máel Muad the king of Munster, from his stronghold on the Rock of Cashel. The rock is a natural fortress, a craggy limestone hill rising abruptly and offering a magnificent view over the fertile plains of County Tipperary. The rock is now crowned by the ruins of a medieval cathedral and one of Ireland’s tallest surviving round towers, so little evidence of earlier structures survives. In legend, Máel Muad’s ancestor Conall Corc made Cashel the capital of Munster after two swineherds told him of a vision in which an angel prophesised that whoever was the first to light a bonfire on the rock would win the kingship of Munster. Conall needed no more encouragement and had hurried to Cashel and lit a fire. This was supposed to have happened around sixty years before St Patrick visited around 453 and converted Munster’s then king Óengus to Christianity. During the baptismal ceremony the saint accidentally pierced Óengus’ foot with the sharp end of his crozier. The king, thinking it was part of the ritual, suffered in silence.

Mathgamain’s success in capturing Cashel promised to make the Dál Cais a major power as Munster was one of the most important of Ireland’s over-kingdoms, covering the whole of the south-west of the island. However, before Mathgamain could win effective control of Munster, Máel Muad murdered him and recaptured Cashel. Brian now unexpectedly found himself king of the Dál Cais and quickly proved himself to be a fine soldier. After his expulsion from Limerick in 972, Ivar established a new base on Scattery Island, close to the mouth of the Shannon, from where he could still easily threaten Dál Cais. This sort of tactic had served Vikings well since the 840s, but no more. Brian had learned the importance of naval power from the Vikings and in 977 he led a fleet to Scattery Island, surprising and killing Ivar. A year later Brian defeated and killed his brother’s murderer to regain control of Cashel. Very shortly afterwards he defeated his last serious rival for control of Munster, Donnubán of the Uí Fidgente, and the remnants of the Limerick Vikings under Ivar’s son Harald. Both Donnubán and Harald were killed. This spelled the end of Viking Limerick. The town now effectively became the capital of Dál Cais, but Brian allowed its Norse inhabitants to remain in return for their valuable military and naval support. In the years that followed, Brian also became overlord of the Viking towns of Cork, Wexford and Waterford.

Now secure in his control of Munster, Brian began to impose his authority on the neighbouring provinces of Connacht and Leinster. Brian’s ambitions inevitably brought him into conflict with Dublin’s overlord, Máel Sechnaill. Almost every year, Brian campaigned in either Leinster, Meath or Connacht. Limerick and other Viking towns provided Brian with fleets, which he sent up the River Shannon to ravage the lands of Connacht and Meath on either side. When Donchad mac Domnaill, the king of Leinster, submitted to Brian in 996 Máel Sechnaill recognised him as overlord of all of the southern half of Ireland, including Dublin. Brian almost immediately faced a rebellion by Donchad’s successor in Leinster, Máel Morda, and the king of Dublin, Sihtric Silkbeard (r. 989 – 1036). Sihtric was another son of Olaf Cuarán, by his second wife Gormflaith, who was Máel Morda’s sister. Brian’s crushing victory over the allies at the battle of Glen Mama in 999 left him unchallenged in the south. Brian dealt generously with Sihtric, allowing him to remain king, and marrying Gormflaith, so making him his son-in-law. There was a brief peace before Brian, his sights now set on the high kingship itself, went back onto the offensive against Máel Sechnaill. Sihtric played a full part in these campaigns, providing troops and warships. Finally defeated in 1002, Máel Sechnaill resigned his title in favour of Brian and accepted him as his overlord: it was the first time that anyone other than an Uí Néill had been high king. Two more years of campaigning and every kingdom in Ireland had become tributary to Brian, hence his nickname bóraime, ‘of the tributes’.

Brian’s achievement was a considerable one but he did not in any meaningful sense unite Ireland: outside his own kingdom of Dál Cais, Brian exercised authority indirectly, through his tributary kings, and he created no national institutions of government. Nor was the obedience of Brian’s tributaries assured: he faced, and put down, several rebellions. The most serious of these rebellions began in 1013 when Máel Mórda of Leinster renewed his alliance with Sihtric Silkbeard, who, despite Brian’s conciliatory approach, still hoped to recover Dublin’s independence. To strengthen Dublin’s forces, Sihtric called in an army of Vikings under Sigurd the Stout, the jarl of Orkney, and Brodir, a Dane from the Isle of Man, which arrived at Dublin just before Easter 1014. Brian quickly raised an army that included several of his tributary kings, including Maél Sechnaill, and a contingent of Vikings under Brodir’s brother Óspak. The two armies met in battle at Clontarf, a few miles north of Dublin on Good Friday (23 April) 1014. Neither Brian nor Sihtric fought in the battle. Sihtric watched the battle from the walls of Dublin, where he had remained with a small garrison to defend the city if the battle was lost. Now in his seventies or eighties, Brian was too frail to take any part in the fighting and spent the battle in his tent. The exact size of the rival armies is unknown but Brian’s was probably the larger of the two.

The battle opened around daybreak in heroic style with a single combat between two champion warriors, both of whom died in a deadly embrace, their swords piercing one another’s hearts. The fighting was exceptionally fierce but Brian’s army eventually gained the upper hand and began to inflict severe casualties on the Vikings and the Leinstermen. Brian’s son and designated successor, Murchad, led the attack and was said personally to have killed 100 of the enemy, fifty holding his sword in his right hand and fifty holding his sword in his left hand, before he was himself cut down and killed. Among Murchad’s victims was jarl Sigurd. Of the Dublin Vikings fighting in the army, only twenty are said to have survived the battle and the Leinster-Dublin army as a whole suffered as many as 6,000 casualties. By evening, the Leinster-Dublin army was disintegrating in flight and many Vikings drowned as they tried desperately to reach their ships anchored in Dublin Bay. At this moment of victory, Brodir and a handful of Viking warriors broke through the enemy lines and killed Brian as he prayed in his tent. Brodir’s men were quickly killed by Brian’s bodyguards and, according to Icelandic saga traditions, Brodir was captured and put to a terrible death. His stomach was cut open and he was walked round and round a tree until all his entrails had been wound out. Máel Mórda and one of his tributary kings were also killed in the fighting, as too were two tributary kings on Brian’s side.

For the anonymous author of the Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh, Clontarf was the decisive battle of Ireland’s Viking wars, but this exaggerates its importance. The author of the Coghad was essentially a propagandist for Brian Boru’s Ua Briain dynasty and he intended, by glorifying his achievements, to bolster his descendents’ claim to the high kingship of Ireland, which they contested with the Uí Néills. The true impact of the battle was rather different. The deaths of Brian and Murchad caused a succession crisis in Dál Cais that brought the rise of the Ua Briain dynasty to a crashing halt. Brian’s hard-won hegemony immediately disintegrated, Cashel reverted to its traditional rulers, and Máel Sechnaill reclaimed the high kingship. Sihtric found himself back where he had started his reign, a sub-king to Máel Sechnaill. There could have been no clearer way to demonstrate how far gone in decline Viking power in Ireland already was. Sihtric continued to take part in Ireland’s internecine conflicts but his defeats outnumbered his successes, and Dublin’s decline into political and military irrelevance continued. Dublin continued to prosper as Ireland’s most important port, however, making Sihtric a wealthy ruler. In 1029 he ransomed his son Olaf, who had been captured by the king of Brega, for 1,200 cows, 120 Welsh ponies, 60 ounces (1.7 kg) of gold, 60 ounces of silver, hostages, and another eighty cattle for the man who had conducted the negotiations. Though he was quite willing to sack monasteries when it suited him, Sihtric was a devout Christian and in 1028 he made a pilgrimage to Rome. Such journeys were primarily penitential and, as an active Viking, Sihtric no doubt had much to be penitential about. On his return to Dublin he founded Christ Church cathedral but pointedly placed it under the authority of the Archbishopric of Canterbury in England, then ruled by the Danish King Cnut. It was not until 1152 that the diocese of Dublin became part of the Irish church. His alliance with Cnut briefly resurrected Dublin as a power in the Irish Sea, but Cnut’s death in 1035 left Sihtric in a weak position. In 1036 Echmarcach mac Ragnaill, a Norse-Gaelic king of the Hebrides, captured Dublin and forced Sihtric into exile: he died in 1042, possibly murdered during another pilgrimage to Rome.

Echmarcach never succeeded in securing his hold on Dublin and in 1052 he was expelled by Diarmait mac Máel, the king of Leinster, who ruled the city directly as an integral part of his kingdom. For the next century Dublin became a prize to be fought over by rival Irish dynasties interspersed with periods of rule by Norse kings from the Isle of Man, the Hebrides, and even Norway.

By the eleventh century the Viking towns had become fully integrated into Irish political life, accepted for the trade they brought and the taxes they paid on it, and their fleets of warships, which made them valuable allies in the wars of the Irish kings. Pagan burial customs had died out during the second half of the tenth century so it is likely that by now the Irish Vikings were mostly converted to Christianity. It was not only kings like Sihtric Silkbeard who had taken Irish wives, and in many cases the children of these mixed marriages were Gaelic speaking. It is even possible that people of Norse descent were minorities in the Viking towns among a population of slaves, servants, labourers and craftsmen that was mostly Irish. The Irish Vikings had become sufficiently different from ‘real’ Scandinavians to have acquired a new name, the Ostmen, meaning ‘men of the east’ (of Ireland). The name seems to have been coined by the English, who by this time had had ample opportunities to learn how to distinguish between different types of Scandinavian.

In its general appearance, Ostman Dublin was probably much like other Viking towns of the period, such as York or Hedeby in Denmark. In the tenth century the site was divided up by post-and-wattle fences into long narrow plots along streets. Sub-rectangular houses built of wood, wattles, clay and thatch were built end-on to the streets, with doors at both ends. Though the houses were often rebuilt, the boundaries of the plots themselves remained unchanged for centuries. Irish kings used these plots as the basic unit for levying tribute on Dublin, as Máel Sechnaill did in 989 when he levied an ounce (28 g) of gold for every plot. Paths around the houses were covered with split logs, or gravel and paving slabs. The streets of Ostman Dublin lie under the modern streets, so it is not known what they were surfaced with, but split logs were used in other Viking towns like York. Different quarters of the town were assigned to different activities. Comb-makers and cobblers were concentrated in the area of High Street, while wood-carvers and merchants occupied Fishamble Street, for example. Other crafts, like blacksmithing and shipbuilding, were probably carried out outside the town. The wreck of a Viking longship discovered at Skuldelev near Roskilde in Denmark proved to have been built of oak felled near Glendalough, 22 miles south of Dublin, in 1042.

The town was surrounded by an earth rampart, which was probably surmounted by a wooden palisade. By 1000, Dublin had begun to spread outside its walls and a new rampart was built to protect the new suburbs. By 1100 it had proved necessary to extend the defences again, this time with a stone wall that was up to 12 feet high. This was such a novelty that a poem of 1120 considered Dublin to be one of the wonders of Ireland. Dublin probably lacked any impressive public buildings – even the cathedral founded by Sihtric Silkbeard was built of wood and it would not be rebuilt in stone until the end of the twelfth century. Dublin’s four other known churches were probably also wooden structures. The basic institution of Dublin’s government, as in all Viking Age Scandinavian communities, was the thing, the meeting of all freemen. The thing met at the 40-foot (12 m) high thingmote (‘thing mound’), which was sited near the medieval castle. This survived until 1685, when it was levelled to make way for new buildings. Of the other Ostman towns, only Waterford has seen extensive archaeological investigations. Like Dublin it was a town of wooden buildings laid out in orderly plots within stout defences.

Viking Dublin was finally brought to an end not by the Irish but by the Anglo-Normans. In 1167, Diarmait MacMurchada, exiled to England from his kingdom of Leinster, recruited a band of Anglo-Norman mercenaries to help him win back his kingdom. Reinforcements arrived in Leinster in 1169 and, with their help, Diarmait captured the Ostman town of Wexford. In 1170, Richard Fitzgilbert de Clare, popularly known as Strongbow, the earl of Pembroke, brought an army of 200 knights and 1,000 archers to support Diarmait, and within days he had captured another Ostman town, Waterford. On 21 September in the same year, Diarmait and Strongbow captured Dublin. The city’s last Norse king Asculf Ragnaldsson (r. 1160 – 71) fled to Orkney where he raised an army to help him win it back. In June 1171, Asculf returned with a fleet of sixty ships and attempted to storm Dublin’s east gate. The Norman garrison sallied out on horseback and scattered Asculf’s men. Asculf was captured as he fled back to his ships. The Normans generously offered to release Asculf if he paid a ransom, but when he foolishly boasted that he would return next time with a much larger army, they thought better of it and chopped his head off instead. Cork was the last Ostman town to fall to the Anglo-Normans, following the defeat of its fleet in 1173.

The Anglo-Norman conquest was a far more decisive event in Irish history than the advent of the Vikings. Despite their long presence in the country, the Viking impact on Ireland was surprisingly slight. Viking art styles influenced Irish art styles, and the Irish adopted Viking weapons and shipbuilding methods, and borrowed many Norse words relating to ships and seafaring into the Gaelic language, but that was about it. The Vikings certainly drew Ireland more closely into European trade networks and by the tenth century this had stimulated the development of regular trade fairs at the monastic towns. However, on the eve of the Anglo-Norman conquest, the Viking towns were still Ireland’s only fully developed urban communities. In contrast over fifty new towns were founded in the century after the Anglo-Norman conquest. Sihtric Silkbeard was the first ruler in Ireland to issue coinage in c. 997, but no native Irish ruler imitated his example: coinage only came into common use in Ireland after the Anglo-Norman conquest. The impact of Viking raiding did accelerate the slow process of political centralisation in Ireland, but even in 1169 the country still lacked any national government institutions. The high kings still exercised authority outside their personal domains indirectly through their tributary kings (though there were many fewer of them than when the Vikings had first arrived). A true national kingship would likely have emerged eventually, but the Anglo-Norman conquest brought this internal process to a sudden end. English governmental institutions were imposed in those areas controlled by the Anglo-Normans, while in those areas still controlled by the Irish, kingship degenerated into warlordism. There were no more high kings.

Dublin prospered after the Anglo-Norman conquest, becoming the centre of English rule in Ireland. England’s King Henry II (r. 1154 – 89) granted Dublin a charter of liberties based on those of the important English West Country port of Bristol. This gave Dublin privileged access to Henry’s vast British and French lands, spurring a period of rapid growth. One of Henry’s edicts took the Ostmen of Dublin and the other Norse towns under royal protection: their skills as merchants and seafarers made them far too useful to expel (though some chose to leave voluntarily). An influx of English settlers gradually made the Ostmen a minority in the city, however. The Ostmen also found that they did not always receive the privileges they had been granted because of the difficulty in distinguishing so many of them from the native Irish. In 1263, the dissatisfied Ostmen appealed to the Norwegian king Håkon IV to help them expel the English, but the collapse of Norse power that followed his death later that year ended any possibility that Dublin would recover its independence. Norse names soon fell out of use and by c. 1300, the Ostmen had been completely assimilated with either the native Irish or the immigrant English communities. A last vestige of the Viking domination of the city survives in the suburb of Oxmantown, a corruption of Ostmantown.