The text following this potted biography gives an account of the educational system of the Gaels written by Alice Stopford Green who lived from May 1847 to 28 May 1929.  She was an Irish historian, nationalist, and member of the first Seanad Éireann – the upper house of the Oireachtas (parliament) of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1936. It has also been known simply as the Senate.

 

Born Alice Sophia Amelia Stopford in Kells, County Meath, she was the daughter of Edward Adderley Stopford, the Rector of Kells and Archdeacon of Meath. Her family had deep roots in the Church of Ireland, with her grandfather serving as the Bishop of Meath. In early adulthood, she lived in London from 1874 to 1877, where she met and later married historian John Richard Green. Following his death in 1883, she began to carve out her own scholarly identity, publishing her first significant work, Henry II, in 1888.

 

In the 1890s, inspired by her friendship with nationalist John Francis Taylor, Stopford Green became increasingly involved in Irish history and the nationalist movement. She was an outspoken critic of English colonial practices, particularly during the Boer Wars, and supported efforts to reform abuses in the Congo. Her seminal work, The Making of Ireland and its Undoing was published in 1908 and highlighted the richness of native Irish civilization arguing for Irish autonomy.

 

She was to become a key intellectual figure in Dublin, where her home at 90 St Stephen’s Green served as a salon for intellectuals and thinkers. After the establishment of the Irish Free State, she was appointed as one of the first independent members of the Seanad Éireann in 1922 where she served until her death in 1929. Alice Stopford Green remains a notable figure in Irish history for her contributions to scholarship and Ireland. Her published works, including Town Life in the Fifteenth Century and History of the Irish State to 1014 which reflect her passion for Irish history and identity.

 

What follows are verbatim excerpts from her book ‘Irish Nationality’ with subheadings which have been added:

 

 

The Structure of Gaelic Society

The same right of self-government extended through the whole hierarchy of states up to the Ardri or high king at the head. The “hearth of Tara” was the center of all the Gaelic states and the demesne of the Ardri. “This then is my foster mother,” said the ancient sage, “the island in which ye are, even Ireland, and the familiar knee of this island is the hill on which ye are, namely, Tara.”

 

The Role of Tara

There the Ardri was crowned at the pillar-post. At Tara, “the fort of poets and learned men,” the people of all Ireland gathered at the beginning of each high king’s reign and were entertained for seven days and nights—kings and ollaves together round the high king, warriors and reavers together, the youths and maidens, and the proud foolish folk in the chambers round the doors, while outside was for young men and maidens because their mirth used to entertain them.

Huge earthen banks still mark the site of the great hall, seven hundred and sixty feet long and ninety feet wide, with seven doors to the east and as many more to the west; where kings and chiefs sat, each under his own shield, in crimson cloaks with gold brooches, with girdles and shoes of gold, and spears with golden sockets and rivets of red bronze.

The Ardri, supreme lord and arbitrator among them, was surrounded by his councillors—the law men or brehons, the bards and chroniclers, and the druids, teachers, and men of science. He was the representative of the whole national life. But his power rested on the tradition of the people and on the consent of the tribes. He could impose no new law; he could demand no service outside the law.

 

 

The Political and Legal Framework

The political bond of union, which seemed so loose, drew all its strength from a body of national tradition and a universal code of law, which represented, as it were, the common mind of the people, the spontaneous creation of the race. Separate and independent as the tribes were, all accepted the one code which had been fashioned in the course of ages by the genius of the people. The same law was recited in every tribal assembly.

The same traditions and genealogies bound the tribes together as having a single heritage of heroic descent and fame. The preservation of their common history was the concern of the whole people. One of the tales pictures their gathering at Tara, when before the men of Ireland the ancients related their history, and Ireland’s chief scholars heard and corrected them by the best tradition.

“Victory and blessings attend you, noble sirs,” the men of Erin said; “for such instruction it was meet that we should gather ourselves together.” And at the reciting of the historic glories of their past, the whole congregation arose together “for in their eyes it was an augmenting of the spirit and an enlargement of the mind.”

 

 

Education and the Learned Class

To preserve this national tradition, a learned class was carefully trained. There were schools of lawyers to expound the law; schools of historians to preserve the genealogies, the boundaries of lands, and the rights of classes and families; and schools of poets to recite the traditions of the race.

The learned men were paid at first by the gifts of the people, but the chief among them were later endowed with a settled share of the tribal land in perpetuity. So long as the family held the land, they were bound to train up in each generation that one of the household who was most fit to carry on learning, and thus for centuries long lines of distinguished men added fame to their country and drew to its schools students from far and wide.

Through their work, the spirit of the Irish found national expression in a code of law which showed not only extraordinarily acute and trained intelligence but a true sense of equity, in a literary language of great richness and of the utmost musical beauty, and in a system of metrical rules for poets shaped with infinite skill. The Irish nation had a pride in its language beyond any people in Europe outside of the Greeks and Romans.

 

 

The Interconnectedness of Schools

While each tribe had its schools, these were linked together in a national system. Professors of every school were free of the island; it was the warrior’s duty to protect them as they moved from court to court. An ancient tale tells how the chiefs of Emain near Armagh placed sentinels along the Gap of the North to turn back every poet who sought to leave the country and to bring on their way with honor every one who sought to enter in.

There was no stagnation where competition extended over the whole island. The greatest of the teachers were given the dignity of “Professors of all the Gaels.” Learned men in their degrees ranked with kings and chiefs, and high professors sat by the high king and shared his honors. The king, said the laws, “could by his mere word decide against every class of persons except those of the two orders of religion and learning, who are of equal value with himself.”

 

 

The Significance of Irish Learning

It is in this exaltation of learning in the national life that we must look for the real significance of Irish history—the idea of a society loosely held in a political sense, but bound together in a spiritual union. The assemblies which took place in every province and every petty state were the guarantees of the national civilization.

They were periodical exhibitions of everything the people esteemed—democracy, aristocracy, king-craft, literature, tradition, art, commerce, law, sport, religion, display, even rustic buffoonery. The years between one festival and another were spent in serious preparation for the next; a multitude of maxims were drawn up to direct the conduct of the people. So deeply was their importance felt that the Irish kept the tradition diligently and, even in the darkest times of their history, down to the seventeenth century, still gathered to “meetings on hills” to exercise their law and hear their learned men.

 

 

National Unity and Identity

In the time of the Roman Empire, therefore, the Irish looked on themselves as one race, obedient to one law, united in one culture, and belonging to one country. Their unity is symbolized by the great genealogical compilations in which all the Gaels are traced to one ancestry, and in the collections of topographical legends dealing with hundreds of places, where every nook and corner of the island is supposed to be of interest to the whole of Ireland.

The tribal boundaries were limits to the material power of a chief and to that only; they were no barriers to the national thought or union. The learned man of the clan was the learned man of the Gaelic race. By all the higher matters of language and learning, of equity and history, the people of Ireland were one.

A noble figure told the unity of their land within the circuit of the ocean. The Three Waves of Erin, they said, smote upon the shore with a foreboding roar when danger threatened the island; Cleena’s wave called to Munster at an inlet near Cork, while Tonn Rury at Dundrum and Tonn Tuaithe at the mouth of the Barm sounded to the men of Ulster.

 

 

Weaknesses of the Irish System

The weaknesses of the Irish system are apparent. The numerous small territories were tempted, like larger European states, to raid borders, to snatch land or booty, and to suffer some expense of trained soldiers. Candidates for the chiefdom had to show their fitness, and “a young lord’s first spoil” was a necessary exploit. There were wild plundering raids in the summer nights; disorders were multiplied. A country divided in government was weakened for purposes of offense or for joint action in military matters.

These evils were genuine, but they have been exaggerated. Common action was hindered, not mainly by human contentions, but by the forests and marshes, lakes, and rivers in flood that lay over a country heavy with Atlantic clouds. Riots and forays there were, among a martial race and strong men of hot passions, but Ireland was in fact no prominent example of medieval anarchy or disorder. Local feuds were no greater than those which afflicted England down to the Norman Conquest and long after it; and which marked the life of European states and cities through the Middle Ages.

The professional war bands of Fiana that hired themselves out from time to time were controlled and recognized by law, and had their special organization and rites and rules of war. It has been supposed that in the passion of tribal disputes men mostly perished by murder and battle slaughter, and the life of every generation was by violence shortened to less than the common average of thirty years.

Irish genealogies prove, on the contrary, that the generations must be counted at from thirty-three to thirty-six years: the tale of kings, judges, poets, and householders who died peacefully in honored old age, or from some natural accident, outruns the list of sudden murders or deaths in battle.

Historical evidence, moreover, shows us a country of widening cornfields, or growing commerce, where wealth was gathered, where art and learning swept like a passion over the people, and schools covered the land. Such industries and virtues do not flourish in regions given over to savage strife. And it is significant that Irish chiefs who made great wars hired professional soldiers from overseas.

 

 

The Benefits of the Irish System

If the disorders of the Irish system have been magnified, its benefits have been forgotten. All Irish history proved that the division of the land into separate military districts, where the fighting men knew every foot of ground, and had an intense local patriotism, gave them a power of defense which made conquest by the foreigner impossible; he had first to exterminate the entire people.

The same division into administrative districts gave also a singular authority to law. In medieval states, however excellent were the central codes, they were only put in force just so far as the king had power to compel men to obey, and that power often fell very far short of the nominal boundaries of his kingdom.

But in Ireland, every community and every individual was interested in maintaining the law of the people, the protection of the common folk; nor were its landmarks ever submerged or destroyed. Irish land laws, for example, in spite of the changes that gradually covered the land with fenced estates, did actually preserve through all the centuries popular rights—fixity of rates for the land, fixity of tenure, security of improvement, and refusal to allow great men to seize forests for their chase: under this people’s law, no Peasant Revolt ever arose, nor any rising of the poor against their lords.

Rights of inheritance and due solemnities of election were accurately preserved. The authority and continuity of Irish law were recognized by wondering Englishmen—”They observe and keep such laws and statutes which they make upon hills in their country firm and stable, without breaking them for any favor or reward,” said an English judge. “The Irish are more fearful to offend the law than the English or any other nation whatsoever.”

 

 

The Diffusion of Intelligence

The tribal system had another benefit for Irishmen—the diffusion of a high intelligence among the whole people. A varied education, spread over many centers, fertilized the general life. Every countryside that administered its own affairs must of necessity possess a society rich in all the activities that go to make up a full community—chiefs, doctors, soldiers, judges, historians, poets, artists and craftsmen, skilled herdsmen, tillers of the ground, raisers and trainers of horses, innkeepers, huntsmen, merchants, dyers, weavers, and tanners.

In some secluded places in Ireland, we can still trace the settlements made by Irish communities. They built no towns nor needed any in the modern sense. But entrenchments of earth, or “raths,” thickly gathered together, mark a site where men lived in close association. Roads and paths great and small were maintained according to law, and boats carried travelers along rivers and lakes.

So frequent were the journeys of scholars, traders, and messengers from tribe to tribe, men gathering to public assemblies, craftsmen, dealers in hides and wool, poets, men and women making their circuit, that there was made in early time a “road-book” or itinerary, perhaps some early form of map, of Ireland.

 

 

The Cultural Richness of Irish Society

This life of opportunity in thickly congregated county societies gave to Ireland its wide culture, and the incredible number of scholars and artificers that it poured out over Europe with generous ardor. The multitudinous centers of discussion scattered over the island, and the rapid intercourse of all these centers one with another, explain how learning broadened, and how Christianity spread over the land like a flood. It was to these county settlements that the Irish owed the richness of their civilization, the generosity of their learning, and the passion of their patriotism.

 

 

Contrasts in Irish Society

Ireland was a land then, as now, of intense contrasts, where equilibrium was maintained by opposites, not by a perpetual tending towards the middle course. In things political and social, the Irish showed a conservatism that no intercourse could shake, side by side with eager readiness and great success in grasping the latest progress in arts or commerce.

In their literature, strikingly modern thoughts jostle against the most primitive crudeness; “Vested interests are shameless” was one of their old observations. In Ireland, the old survived beside the new, and as the new came by free assimilation, old and new did not conflict. The balance of opposites gave color and force to their civilization, and Ireland, until the thirteenth century and very largely until the seventeenth century, escaped or survived the successive steamrollings that reduced Europe to nearly one common level.

 

 

The Democratic Spirit of the Irish System

In the Irish system, we may see the shaping of a true democracy—a society in which ever-broadening masses of the people are made intelligent sharers in the national life and conscious guardians of its tradition. Their history is throughout a record of the nobility of that experiment. It would be a mechanical theory of human life which denied to the people of Ireland the praise of true patriotism or the essential spirit of a nation.

 

 

The Legacy of Irish Culture

The spirit of the north rang out in a multitude of bards, whose works perished in a century of persecution and destruction. Among exiles in Connacht, manuscripts perished, but old tradition lived on the lips of the peasants, who recited in their cabins the love-songs and religious poems of long centuries past.

The people, in the bareness of their poverty, were nourished with a literature full of wit, imagination, feeling, and dignity. In the poorest hovels, there were men skilled in fine recitation. Their common language showed the literary influence, and Irish peasants even in our own day have used a vocabulary of some five thousand words, as against about eight hundred words used by peasants in England. Even the village dancing at the cross-roads preserved a fine and skilled tradition.

Families, too, still tried to have “a scholar” in their house, for the old learning’s sake. Children shut out from all means of education might be seen learning their letters by copying with chalk the inscriptions on their fathers’ tombstones. There were few candles, and the scholar read his books by a cabin fire in the light given by throwing upon it twigs and dried furze.

Manuscripts were carefully treasured, and in days when it was death or ruin to be found with an Irish book, they were buried in the ground or hidden in the walls. In remote places, schools were maintained out of the destitution of the poor; like that one which was kept up for over a hundred years in County Waterford, where the people of the surrounding districts supported “poor scholars” free of charge.

There were some in Kerry, some in Clare, where a very remarkable group of poets sprang up. From all parts of Ireland, students begged their way to “the schools of Munster.” Thus Greek and Latin still found their way into the laborer’s cottage. In County Cork, John Clairech O’Donnell, in remembrance of the ancient assemblies of the bards of all Ireland, gathered to his house poets and learned men to recite and contend as in the old days.

Famous as a poet, he wrote part of a history of Ireland and projected a translation of Homer into Irish. But he worked in peril, flying for his life more than once before the bard-hunters; in his denunciations, the English oppressor stands before us—plentiful his costly living in the high-gabled, lighted-up mansion of the Irish Brian, but tight-closed his door, and his churlishness shut up inside with him there in an opening between two mountains, until famine clove to the people and bowed them to his will; his gate he never opened to the moan of the starving, “and oh! may heaven of the saints be a red wilderness for James Dawson!”

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