Ireland was entirely Celtic in 600 AD, apart from Christian missionaries. The druids didn’t have a fixed liturgy, and probably had deep roots and eclectic beliefs from tribe to tribe and place to place. There’s an interesting description of the druidic sacrifice of a local king due to some typical flimsy excuse, like a bad harvest. Kings would have been much better off just starting their reigns by cutting the throats of the druids and dumping the carcasses in the river. But that’s just me. :’)
The Vikings’ invasions and raids were ferocious in Ireland; some of the big cities in Ireland had Viking foundations. The Viking/Irish struggle came to a head at the Battle of, uh, oh oh... anyway, the aged King Brian Boru is credited with the victory, though he died in the battle. Ireland had wound up split into the Five Fifths, but as in other countries in history, there were occasionally vassals who wound up with a great deal of autonomy because they got wealthy one way or other. Midh or Meath, the smallest of the five, wound up getting erased by a couple of its neighbors, and its name survives as one of the counties.
Dublin was the foothold of the House of Normandy; after the 1066 usurpation of the English throne by William the Bastard, supposedly one of the Irish fifths hired the Normans to help him win a war, one of the continual internecine wars in Irish history. The Normans held on to an ever-growing strip, called The Pale (hence the term, “beyond the Pale,” I suppose).
By the time of Elizabeth I, the English crown had been in control of a varying amount of Ireland for centuries. Lizzie’s wars there were fairly expensive, and one of her young up and comings was sent out of the court to keep him from doing something stupid; he was assigned the final conquest of Ireland. He got there, did little, wound up secretly collaborating with the enemy, and that didn’t go over very well back in London.
Irish rebellion against British rule continued off and on, here and there, all the way into the present. Oliver Cromwell conducted a massacre right in a church in Ireland, which was rude at best. Suffice to say, the concept of sanctuary has had varying levels of success.
During the Glorious Revolution, in which James II was chased off the British throne by William and Mary (James and Mary were siblings, she had been married off to the head of the House of Orange), the final clash between the Catholic James and the Protestant William was in Ireland. There’s a reference to this in a song by the late Stan Rogers, the Canadian folksinger, I think the song is called “House of Orange”.
Later, General Cornwallis, who is most famous in the US for finally leading the British defeat at Yorktown, wasn’t disgraced per se back home, but was assigned the task of putting down an Irish rebellion, which he did with alacrity. I think he later served in India as well.
Wow, SunkenCiv, that was INTERESTING! Just got home from work, (yes, it’s after 9pm, I’m a nurse, work an hour away). Sat here reading and re-reading this, complicated and new to me, but very interesting. Don’t know much about the history of Ireland, though I’m Irish, my grandmother born and raised there, Cork, came here when she was 20.
The druid thing is interesting, as I don’t know much about what that was all about.
Of course, as all history, it’s bloody. To quote a man who said honestly, but profoundly, ‘why can’t we all just get along’.